


Heavy Strings

by ljs



Series: the Deep Ellum stories [3]
Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-18
Updated: 2012-12-18
Packaged: 2017-11-21 11:53:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 31,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/597456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ljs/pseuds/ljs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written in 2006. The 'verse goes AU after Season 7 "Selfless" and <i>Angel</i> Season 2 "Dead End." This particular fic is set a year and a half after the events of "Outside Deep Ellum", and a year and some months after the AU's end of Sunnydale. Giles and Anya live just outside the funky Dallas neighbourhood of Deep Ellum, in a flat above the magic shop Anya manages, and Giles works for a mysterious figure named the Blind One. This story concerns heavy strings both literal and metaphorical, bad magic, good music, London visits, and the difficulty of getting through the bad times.</p>
<p>Acknowledgements: Blind Willie Johnson; Stevie Ray Vaughan.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>  <i>I use heavy strings, tune low, play hard and floor it. Floor it. That's technical talk.</i><br/>—Stevie Ray Vaughan</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

"Rupert, should I get your hat for you?"

When Anya’s question rings through the closed bathroom door, the mirror all but shivers, inside and out.

Good God, not again. Giles sighs at his wavering reflection before putting away the mouthwash and then saying with some emphasis, "I rather thought I wouldn’t wear it tonight."

The door flies open. She doesn’t look pleased. Beautiful, yes – cream and gold, and a new softness in the charity-shop designer clothing she favours – but not happy with him. And an unhappy Anya is apt to make her point with force....

"Honey, I bought you the hat, I _love_ you in the hat! Why do you want to deprive me of Sharp-Dressed You?"

"Ah-hah. So you only love me when I wear it?" He leans forward to steal a kiss. This is a tactical error, as she’s prone to nip when displeased. Pulling away, a finger to a newly chewed lip, he frowns at her. "Biting’s not the best strategy to get your way, darling."

"I’m very sorry." She could hardly sound less so. "Also, you know perfectly well I love you even without the attractive and also protective headgear. But you put away the fedora in March because you said it was for autumn and winter wear, and now it _is_ autumn, which means–"

"Which means it should _be_ autumn, not this bloody never-ending summer." With a hand to her waist, he walks them both out of the bathroom and into their far too hot bedroom, despite the ceiling fan and air-conditioner. "I promise that when it’s a proper temperature, I’ll bring it out for you."

Dallas bakes in what he’s assured is a completely normal heatwave for October – trapped sun slides through the windows even now, a few hours after sunset. He’s rarely been so uncomfortable, and it’s worse because he yearns for cool this time of year. For a moment he misses England, longs for cold rain-winds and conkers and a jacket and scarf, still green grass and tea that’s neither iced nor that bloody ‘sweet’ horror, Somerset hills and London streets.

But then Anya bends over her bag, rooting about for something, and he remembers in body, mind and spirit just why he’s happily lived in Texas for a year and a half, unconscionable heat or not. Here is his Anya, and here now is his duty. He values both far more than he feels comfortable expressing.

As he picks up his watch from the bedroom desk, he says, "When are we supposed to meet this Johnny Ames person?"

She stands up empty-handed, pushes newly streaked hair out of her eyes, makes one of her ‘stupid man’ faces. " _You’re_ the Blind One’s Watcher. Don’t you know?"

Yes, of course he does... well, vaguely. When they’d received the message from Terrence about the meeting, he’d been distracted by a recently acquired monograph about swamp-magicks in the Big Thicket. He also knows that she’s got organized everything he needs. It’s one of the perquisites of their life together, his loving Anya and being loved in return – the fact that all details are accounted for, everything neatly in its place, without him having to do anything. However, understanding that it’s impolitic to put it quite that way, he says, "Just checking. It’s, er...."

"Ten-thirty. Right after the first show ends at this dive we’re going to." She stares at him as he puts his watch on the wrist not wearing his commitment band. "Which means?"

"Which means Shanice and Lindsey will be here presently, so we should make the most of the time we have," he says. It’s two steps to her, and then he cradles her face and lifts her to her toes. The kiss is easy, a caress of mouths and tongues and breath, and she makes one of her joyous noises and presses her breasts against him, uncurls like a cat in the sun. He thinks, with a brief sharp pang, that they’ve not done enough of this lately.

He’d love to stroke her the rest of the evening, but they're on a schedule. Ignoring his own arousal, he puts her away from him. "Come on, then," he says. "Work to be done."

They go downstairs and walk through Magic Places in silence. He’s worried about the upcoming meeting; the Blind One has sensed ‘pulls on the fabric,’ dissonance in the local and global harmony that only the Blind One can hear, and this apparently dubious contact might have information about markers of trouble amongst the magic and the mundane. Part of him, however, registers Anya’s quiet as its own marker of trouble, silence as dissonance.

As he opens the outside door for her, he says, "Are you all right?" She gives him a half-smile, which in no way allays his sudden worry. She came up empty-handed, he thinks again – "No, really, Anya."

In the rush of overwhelming night-heat and music from down the block, he can only just hear her say, "Nothing. A rabbit in the grass."

"And what does that mean, pray tell?" His literal-minded love’s use of metaphor is reason enough to fret, he thinks.

"It means that it’s something only I would be upset about," she says without guile or side. "Oh look, here they are!"

Shanice’s old Eldorado pulls up to the curb, the horn sounding three deep notes. It’s a ridiculous tank of a car, truly, but he’s grateful for it tonight – lots of room for him and Anya in the backseat, for one; lots of metal barrier between them and the hostile night, for another. When he and Anya are safely into the artificially cooled, leather interior, he says, "I do appreciate your driving this evening, Shanice."

She waves at him, the gesture doubled in the rearview mirror. " _De nada._ I used to love the place when it was called Jack Black’s. Don’t know that you folks would find it without me. Don’t know if you could get in the door, in fact."

Even seen at an angle and from behind, Lindsey’s grin is illusively wide. "Aw, Niecy darlin’, we can handle ourselves," he says, and bursts out laughing as she slaps his shoulder. Then, while rubbing the assaulted spot: "Y’all ready for some dirty blues?"

"Yep. Dirty blues and weirdness," Anya says, as her hand finds Giles’. "We’d better get going."

He wants to ask more forcefully what’s bothering her, but the turn of her head precludes questions, and this is hardly the time. As Shanice pulls the Eldorado out into traffic, sounding the horn again at a drunk, straggling pedestrian, he tightens his grasp on Anya and slides down in his seat.

Dallas freeways can be disorienting, he’s found, especially at night. When the Eldorado cruises from street to interstate, the lights outside begin to swirl together. It’s worse when Shanice pilots them through what locals call the Mixmaster, a horrific junction of motorways. They take the road that leads them up, up, over three other roads; far below, Dallas and its outflow of suburbs make a tangled skein of light, yellow and red and white strands flickering. There’s always a pull on the fabric when he looks down, and he feels separate from the place where he lives, a visitor from above.

Struck by vertigo, he puts his free hand on the window to brace himself. The glass is still hot from the day.

Lindsey starts humming then, and a few notes in, Giles recognizes the intro to "Let Your Light Shine on Me," a Blind Willie Johnson song he loves. At his request, he and Lindsey play this every jam session – it’s his private thank-you to the universe for giving him this last chance. After waiting for the right breath, he joins the humming.

Then Lindsey does a drumroll on the dashboard. That’s a signal: Giles starts the vocal, and Lindsey joins in even as he makes his own percussion, with Shanice adding her own steering-wheel drumming. Anya scoots closer, and Giles lifts their joined hands to his chest. Finally he does feel braced – at least for the moment.

The song takes them from threads of light into a very bad part of South Dallas, where every other streetlamp is broken and the roads are full of hazards.

When Shanice pulls into the car park of the Bloodknot, the noise from inside rises through its gravel, rumbles past the group of men hovering by the door. "Nasty change from what I knew," she mutters. "And we ain’t even inside yet."

"Yeah. Nasty as hell." Lindsey’s not smiling now, and Giles considers the man’s recurring dips into a familiar inward darkness. McDonald’s depressions grew worse after this spring’s troubles in Los Angeles – one year after Sunnydale disappeared forever, sinking into the fabric of the earth to be rewoven into history. Giles’ thoughts always stick at that reworking, at that loss of so much, and he can’t focus well enough on Lindsey’s troubles –

Glass shatters against the doorframe of the Bloodknot. The men there bark and twist and push, and then they disappear beyond the reach of red and green neon. The door is all the way open now, the bass deeper, the darkness spreading like disease.

"Hmm," Anya says. "Do we think the cops will be arriving to investigate that small destructive moment?"

"Not at the Bloodknot, not the way it looks now." Shanice sighs, then opens her car door, lets in the heat. "Well, sooner done, sooner the hell gone."

When boots touch earth, the burn is intense. Giles pulls Anya closer to him, pushes away remembrance of the Hellmouth, says, "Yes, swords out – metaphorically, of course."

The four of them cross through emptiness toward the Bloodknot’s stygian interior.

....................................................................

"Go right in," the man at the door tells Shanice after money changes hands, and they pass inside.

The curtains of smoke inside remind Anya of one of her least favourite dimensions, as do the smells of perspiring humans and spilled beer and aggression. At any moment she expects to see blood, and not just as a literal interpretation of the bar’s name.

Rupert adjusts so that his right arm is around her and he’s sheltering her with his body. He shouldn’t protect her, she thinks – she might be bad luck. She really might, despite her reprieve from vengeance-punishment.

She’s been dreaming the past few nights of vicious things in the grass, and there have been actual bad omens at the shop, like snapped register tapes and broken good-luck charms, but she can’t read what the signs mean. She remembers the Magic Box basement during a past apocalypse; she’d found that stuffed rabbit which she’d thought was a giant billboard saying "Death and Defeat Here,’ and Xander had laughed at her and asked her to marry him. In retrospective she can interpret what the rabbit was really there to tell her – ‘say No to Xander and go upstairs to find your wonderful Rupert, or your heart will be broken for a time, and there will be blood and loss and so many regrets’ – but hindsight doesn’t do a damn bit of good. What she needs is hindsight in advance.

Rupert’s arm tightens. "Stay close, Anya."

After mentally listing the pros and cons of disputing this rather annoying command, she decides not to push it. She might _not_ be bad luck, after all, and for a man steeped in the arcane and occult and many volumes’ worth of prophecy, Rupert has the oddest fuddy-duddy reaction to what he considers superstition. Also, she does prefer being close to him –

Especially in a place like this. She looks around: a few vampires and pure-bred demons are scattered in between the gold-toothed men and bruised and tired women; weapons are everywhere, knives and guns and even a Hax demon’s pointy metal bar for unsanitary street tracheotomies; over the bar is an old beer sign, mostly burnt out, that red-flashes "OR". Or what, she wonders.

On the small and no doubt sticky stage, a vampire strums the blues very badly on an electric guitar, accompanied by a beat-box, and wails like the feral cat that prowls behind the shop. After a year and a half with Rupert, Anya’s evaluations of music have grown stricter (although she still likes various female mainstream artists such as Carole King and Stevie Nicks, which makes him squirm in dismay when she plays her CDs very loud), and she knows this vamp songster sucks. The three musical types she’s with, in fact, look like they’re being beaten with that Hax demon’s stick.

But more worrying is a reflection in red, not, not.... She can’t articulate what it’s not. But there’s _something_ behind the vampire, a double, a shadow. It’s not supposed to be there.

Shanice grabs Lindsey’s arm – not in a sexual or romantic way, more in a ‘I’m just a DJ and this place scares me, I need a buddy’ way – and says, "Beers all around?"

"We’re taking our lives into our hands to drink anything here, but yes, thank you," Rupert says, before nudging her. "Anya, that table?"

She sees the empty, dirty circle with four chairs a few steps away, and despite her worries about hygiene, they make their way fast enough to beat out a large motorcycle enthusiast and his equally bear-like girlfriend. When the other seekers start to rumble loud enough to drown out the beat-box, Rupert accesses his best Ripper-attitude, which Lindsey jokingly calls ‘the badass sombitch academic’ – she can _feel_ him tighten his muscles, roughen his voice. "You got a fucking problem, mate?"

No problem, the other two say hastily, stumbling away, although the woman turns around to add, "You don’t belong here, Englishman. You and your little whore–"

Anya begins, "I _never_ charged–" but she stops at what sounds like a gunshot.

Rupert’s taken one of the empty bottles and knocked it against the side of the table hard enough to make it crack. It’s not broken all the way yet, but it only will take a finger-push to send it all crashing down, make the ordinary into a weapon. "I don’t allow people to insult my partner," he says coldly.

The patrons of the bar who’d turned around now look away – and boy, she thinks, even big burly types can skedaddle pretty damn fast when they get a hint of what Rupert usually hides.

Not that he’s pleased with himself, of course. He winces himself back to normal and puts the cracked vessel on the table. "I’m sorry. That was...I’m just sorry."

She snuggles close to him, petting away his useless self-disgust. "Stop apologizing, I appreciated the growl. Although of course they wouldn’t have even messed with us if you’d worn The Hat like I asked you...."

"No, they’d have been approximately five times as likely to harass us. That bloody fedora doesn’t fit here any more than I do."

"Do you mean something beyond the fact that this is a hellhole? Are you distinguishing yourself from the rest of us for some Watcher reason?" she says, but before question can become argument, Shanice and Lindsey show up with the beer.

As Lindsey gives them their longnecks, he says, "Jesus, that bloodsucker can’t play."

It’s true that the vampire soloist hits an extremely wrong note at that moment, one that echoes off the walls to cause maximum pain – although Anya’s not sure whether Rupert’s grimace is about the music or his first swallow of Lone Star, which on a previous occasion he judged ‘worse than goat piss.’ (When she asked him if he’d ever actually tasted goat piss, he muttered something about a misread ritual and Ethan Rayne, and then kissed her to make her shut up. She didn’t pursue it.) Anyway, Shanice says, "But it should be that guy’s last number. Del the bartender said that Johnny Ames’s set starts at eleven."

"Which means he should meet us shortly, as planned!" Anya says. Then she pauses. "Were we told he was a musician?"

"We know very little beyond that he’s given the Blind One information before, and Terrence is frightened of him, won’t have him come to Blind Willie’s. Which isn’t particularly encouraging, I have to say." Rupert grimaces again, without beer.

Lindsey props one boot on the edge of the table and tips his chair back, even as he takes a long swallow. Then, wetly: "What on earth or off it could scare big ol’ Terrence?"

The vampire hits one last wrong note, holds it while the beat-box goes crazy and the crowd begins to shuffle its feet.

And Anya shudders like ice has been stabbed into her neck...oh the Powers, this isn’t good. The music stops, and the bar noises rise, applause and laughter and a scream or two when the vamp shows gameface before moving away.

Even so, the cold rushes at her from behind.

A chill hand comes down on her shoulder, presses hard so she can feel long nails digging in. She tastes earth on her tongue.

Rupert says "Let her go," and slips his bottle down so the neck rests against the edge of the table. Another crack, another weapon in the making.

A muddy laugh bubbles from the unseen man’s throat, and she’s released. "Lookee here! So this is who the Blind One sends to meet me – an old Watcher and a shape-shiftin’ demon-girl."

"I’m human now," she says, despite her fear. "I chose this life."

"Shape-shifting girl, gone back to the light to stay! What a pity," Johnny Ames hisses, still laughing, and he comes around to the one empty chair, kicks it back from the table, sits himself down. He’s tall, oddly mottled in the light, gold-toothed like many of the other patrons, and swathed in an ugly Mexican poncho. "But never worry, child. I have a special fondness for shapeshifters and ghost-lovers." He pats Lindsey’s boot at that, slides one hand over his ankle and under his jeans. "Like this one. Hey there, boy."

"Hey," Lindsey says with admirable calm, and he takes another drink.

Well, Anya thinks, Lindsey did put in his combat time at Wolfram and Hart, just as Rupert got his raising demons, just as she got hers through a millennium of vengeance. She hopes it will be good enough practice for dealing with a damn sorcerer of the dark.

She doesn’t like those who misuse voodoo. It’s really bad business in every way.

.........................................................................................

When Giles looks at Johnny Ames for the first time, he thinks, _Bokor_ : practitioner of death-magic, direct line to bad spirits. He also thinks, Fuck.

But he says pleasantly, "My name’s Giles. This is my partner–" he nods at Anya but doesn’t say her name, he bloody well won’t give the man that opening for bad magics–"and two of my colleagues. The Blind One sends his...acknowledgement, and asks for information, as he’s done before."

"‘Acknowledgement.’" Ames laughs again, then leans forward to take Shanice’s beer. She scrapes her chair back, closer to Giles, but she doesn’t protest the loss. The bokor’s eyes flicker; he drinks, and a sudden dank smell, rotted earth and mold, rises like swamp gas. "Well, what kind of information does the old slug want, and what do I get for it?"

"He’s wondering what on the metaphysical landscape might have changed for the worse recently," Giles says. "He’s aware of, er, encroaching darkness, and he thinks you might know more about the kinds of activities which might cause that."

"Not that we’re judging you," Anya puts in. "Just a simple request for information."

Lindsey says, "And we have to hear what you want before we tell you what you get."

"Yeah, yeah. Just a sec, let me study on it." Ames leans back and drinks the beer. The smell of rot and mold is stronger now.

As Giles looks away, he slips his hand into his pocket. The worry-talisman Anya gave him is the focus that allows him to access his small gift of insight. He closes his fingers around the stone, he opens himself up to the world.

The evil emanating from Ames almost chokes Giles. The man is cut off from all the gods he might be expected to worship.

Giles holds tighter to the stone, makes himself see further. The interior of the Bloodknot seems awash with now visible swamp gas, heavy, staining, its steam rising over the stage. He perceives something foul encased in the wooden support-beams, hears faint cries of someone imprisoned.

He looks back at Ames. The bokor’s smile is a death’s-head, and for the first time Giles notes the bulge in Ames’ shirt pocket, the arms of a home-made doll reaching over the material to loll like snapped heavy strings. In fact, they _are_ – cords made of braided guitar strings, twisted into pain.

The cry smothers itself, leaving only the bar noises and the hiss of now invisible gas.

Smiling wider now, Ames puts the half-empty beer down on the table. "‘Bout time for me to play," he says. "So let’s lay it out. Something’s gone and accessed power, called on those long gone, lifted ‘em up to sing – maybe that’s what the Blind One’s hearing, ya know?" Gold-tooth flashes, reflects neon red. "But the real deal is for the Blind One’s ears alone. Not his errand-boys and girls."

"Your price is a meeting with the Blind One?" Lindsey says. "Don’t think he’ll go for that, buddy."

Giles is thinking quickly, however. They have clues to work with now – "My colleague’s right, we would have to consult him first. But assuming we do so, how might we contact you to give you his answer?"

When Ames stands up, he stretches so that the arms of the doll wave helplessly, and Giles’ stomach twists like the cord. Ames looks back at the stage, then looks back, smiling. "Terrence will know, Giles and friends. Oh yeah, Terrence’ll know." He puts his hands on the table and leans in. "You see, children, everybody’s got to be somewheres. But somewheres may surprise ya." Then he smiles wider, the mouth of a grave: "Y’all should stay for the show. Y’all might learn something."

When he walks away, the movement’s somehow jerky, uncoordinated, like a doll manipulated by an invisible hand.

"I don’t think I’ll care for his music," Anya says quietly but emphatically, once the man’s out of earshot. "Can we leave now?"

Giles wraps her hand around his so that she can feel the talisman in his palm. "Let me hear at least the beginning, please."

"Well, you’re the Watcher. Okay." But even as she speaks bravely, her fingers tremble against his.

Shanice uses an empty to push away the beer Ames touched, get it as far from them all as possible – Lindsey uses another broken empty to keep it from falling off. The way they position the bottle means that from Giles’ perspective, red light pours through clarity.

Ames, clambering onstage with an electric guitar in his hand, takes a position directly in line with the red-lit glass. Direct line to bad spirits, Giles thinks. _Fuck._

As Ames plugs in his guitar and touches his nails to the strings, Giles closes his fist around the talisman – and Anya’s fingers close as well, which braces him. He opens his senses –

And there is evil, there is emptiness through which good light refracts red, twists into bad. There come cries from the imprisoned, who have been pulled back from their right road and now dangle helpless in another’s grasp.

"I’m gonna play and sing for y’all tonight. Gonna show you the way to truth," Johnny Ames says into the microphone. The crowd rumbles approval. "Here’s one of my favourites..." As the first notes of Hendrix’s "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" bite into the night, he starts to sing. But–

"That doesn’t sound like Jimi, does it?" Lindsey says.

"No. More like Stevie Ray," Giles says. The attack is so familiar, the vibration of those heavy strings, even the voice, so alive despite the deadness of the eyes – Oh dear God.

Johnny Ames is indeed a bokor of a different kind, and he’s reached back to disturb one long dead.

Shanice, staring at the stage as if literally enthralled, slides her hand toward the bottle from which Ames drank. Her fingers creep closer, and red light spills over them.

The guitar screams like the cry of one imprisoned.

Giles catches her wrist before she gets to the glass. "No! Don’t touch it."

She shudders herself awake, and he lets her go. "What the hell was that?" she mutters, looking at her hands. "What the _hell_ was that?"

"Whatever it was, we’re going." Anya is already on her feet, tugging at him. "Come on, come on, come on."

Giles doesn’t know enough context to stop whatever bad magic’s being cast here, and Anya’s right, they should go. After Lindsey takes Shanice’s arm, the four of them make their way through growling patrons, the human and demon alike merging into one identity.

From every table shine red-tinged eyes, animal glare, dead glare, although that might be a trick of the light, and hands reach out for them. The guitar screams again. Ames sings louder.

He feels something near his ankle, and looks down to see his jeans rip up, exposing his boot. He sees nothing else, not in the dark, but something scrapes like teeth, like claws, nibbling at the leather. It’s going to taste him next....

"Come _on_ , honey," Anya says, and she drags him, stumbling, from dark to dark.

Shanice starts running the second she hits the parking lot, and Lindsey’s right behind her. Giles pushes Anya toward the car, then stops, turns around for one more look.

The doorway to the Bloodknot is a black empty rectangle. In front of it lays a couple of rows of broken glass, now lined up neatly. They reflect red. They look oddly like guitar strings.

"Voodoo Child" still plays, its guitar line snaking through the black rectangle, heavy, rising up to strike–

"Oh, good _grief_ ," Anya says, as she grabs him from behind. "Stop gaping and get your ass in the car!"

As soon as they crawl into the backseat, almost before he can shut the door, Shanice starts the car. Rocks spin from under the wheels as the old V8 engine roars, and they pull out into the half-lit street. Lindsey helps her with a hand on the steering wheel when they hit a hidden hole in the road.

Anya says rather shrilly, "Rupert, what the hell happened to your leg?" and slides over his lap, her head down, to check the tear.

He rests a hand on her nicely presented bottom – the best place to brace himself, he thinks with some amusement – and leans his head back against the seat. "I don’t know. Perhaps it was a rabbit in the grass."

She arches up and twists so she can better glare at him. "That’s not at all humourous."

Before he can reply, his shirt pocket starts to vibrate – his mobile’s ringer is off, he realizes. After he retrieves it, he squints at the display. It’s a text message, but, "Oh for fuck’s sake, I can’t read this."

"Eyesight problem or the horror of text-speak?" Anya asks, even as she flips onto her back and grabs the phone from him. He stretches out his arm across her waist and curves around to steady her, steady them both. He can feel the shudder of the Eldorado’s engine and the jolting of wheels on bad road, he still can hear that bloody song in his head. It’s like the world he cherishes is breaking underneath him –

She says flatly, "It’s from Buffy. Emergency. She wants you to call her back as soon as you can."


	2. Chapter 2

Anya isn’t sure why Rupert doesn’t call Buffy right back, he chose the international calling plan for just this purpose, but he doesn’t. Instead, he takes the phone and turns it off without looking at the message. Then he pulls her back up, scoots her over, tucks her into his side. "Thank you, love," he says.

"You’re welcome," she says. Then she presses her mouth against his sweat-damp shoulder and tries not to freak out. Everyone knows that freaking out is unattractive and unproductive, and why should she, anyway? Just because Johnny Ames does bad, bad voodoo, and he touched her (he didn’t take any of her hair, did he, oh God, she can’t remember), and Rupert has a mysterious, likely mystically derived rip in his clothes, and Shanice almost got ensorcelled, and, well, Anya can’t help it if Buffy phone-calls make her worry–

Lindsey drums a strange little rhythm on the dashboard, and says, "‘Voodoo Child.’ Ain’t that a bitch."

"Let’s call it by its full name. ‘Voodoo Child, Slight Return.’" Rupert’s voice is dry and even, yet she can tell he’s distressed.

‘Slight Return,’ she thinks. Rabbit in the grass. Freaking out is unattractive and unproductive.

She holds on tighter, and the rest of the drive to their street passes silently.

When Shanice parks the car behind Blind Willie’s, Rupert is the first out into the good heat and the faint smell of garbage from the dumpster and the happy, blended sounds of their neighbourhood. He helps Anya out, then says to Lindsey, "Would you tell the Blind One we’ll be up directly?"

Lindsey slams the door. "Not a problem. We’ll wait to start the meeting til you get there." He hovers for a minute, though, hands tight on the rail of the back entrance as if he has to gather his strength before climbing. She wonders briefly what that’s about, if he got zapped with voodoo badness too.

Once Lindsey and Shanice have gone inside, Rupert brings Anya close, his hand rubbing gently against the small of her back. They stand against the warm metal side of the Eldorado that way until he takes out his phone again and thumbs in the code for Buffy’s cell. "Hello, Buffy, I got your message," he says. "What’s the problem, what can I do?"

The classic Rupert-response, she thinks: what can I do, how can I help. But Anya also remembers how hurt he was when he first showed up in Blind Willie’s, and it wasn’t just apocalypse that was crushing him. That old ache still shimmers in his voice, although she doesn’t think he even knows it’s there, and she hugs his middle and rocks them both while he says "Oh right," and "Dear God," and "What about Willow?" and "If you need me to, I’ll do what I can. We’ve got a problem of our own here," and finally, "Yes, if you need me to, Buffy. I’ll ring back in a bit."

He clicks off the phone, then motions with the full hand – sort of ‘I want to put this down, I don’t know where or how’ – before saying abruptly, "Buffy’s asking me to go to England. There are strange phenomena in Bath which someone needs to investigate."

"Did she say specifically ‘someone thinky’?" Anya says.

He laughs at that, a small release of tension. "Yes. Your insight is terrifying."

"Yep." She hugs him again, as a preventive measure against crying, protest, and all the dozen unpleasant things she’s feeling. Then, "Well, we’d better go upstairs and do the talking part about tonight’s research and discovery of big evil, and then you can tell the Blind One you’re going to England."

"Anya," he says, then cuts himself off. He slides his hand up along her spine, fingers brushing at bad history, and kisses her forehead. "Anya, love." But he doesn’t say anything else – yep, cutting himself off from her already, she thinks.

The back door to Blind Willie’s leads to a narrow corridor behind the bar area, leading in turn to the employee restrooms, the break room, the storeroom for the booze. It’s bright and clean and air-conditioned – the cool air seems to blow away part of the bad smells lingering from the Bloodknot. Rupert opens the last door, which leads to the hidden staircase usually accessed by the bar, and they climb up to the Blind One’s floor.

Terrence is sitting at his desk, the way he often does when not directly needed by the Blind One, but his hands are knotted together, working and rubbing as if to clean off something only he can see. He glances up when they arrive. "All right," he says, his usual growl muted. "Boss is waiting."

But he limps more heavily than usual as he leads them in, a sign of his old football injury. Anya wonders what other injuries Terrence hides, and if that creep Johnny Ames ever touched _his_ shoulders.

The three old guitars on the Blind One’s wall shiver, for once out of sync. Lindsey sits in front of the empty desk, with Shanice standing behind him, like she’s ready to run. They turn around when Rupert and Anya walk in.

As Rupert stops, Anya’s gaze goes to the window. The Blind One faces the shuttered glass, one hand on each side of the space. His head is bowed, his cane propped against the wall. "I have made a terrible mistake, that much I know," comes that rich, otherworldly voice, before the big body shifts around. The vestigial horn on his head glints in the light, and the stitches where his eyes should be look wet. Tears? Blood? "I’ll rely on my Watcher to clarify the nature of this error."

She goes to him and touches his ring, in the gesture of respect he doesn’t insist on but she believes he’s owed; touches it again on Rupert’s behalf, as she always does. As she rises from her obeisance, she says, "Rupert has a lot to tell you, sir, but it’s not just about tonight. He just got a call from his Slayer, he’s going to have to leave us."

"Anya, no," Rupert says quietly. " _I’ll_ tell him."

But the Blind One interrupts. "I heard a hint of this from our Lindsey. The fabric is twisting, Rupert, but I can’t see yet how the folds are disposed. You must show me – and tell me about your call."

Anya sees that Shanice has begun to shiver like the guitars -- it’s delayed shock, which had often been a state in which people made Wishes, and anyway Shanice doesn’t have much experience with bad things in the night – so she goes to her and puts her arm around her shoulder. It’s partially to be kind. It’s partially to stop herself shaking too. These things go both ways, she thinks.

As Rupert tells the Blind One about the visit, laying out in his precise way what they saw and _he_ saw, not just with Johnny Ames and his possible link to the late Stevie Ray Vaughan but with the red-eyed and enthralled crowd, Anya watches Terrence and Lindsey. The guy who knows about bad voodoo is pale underneath dark skin, and he hovers near the door like he wants to run away, hurt knee or not. Meanwhile, the lawyer is motionless except for the fingers of the hand he jokingly calls the ‘evil’ one; one finger lifts for each point Rupert makes, and when the word bokor is mentioned, hand becomes fist. "So he’s raising from the dead, taking bits and pieces to make something new?" Lindsey says. "That kind of voodoo shit?"

"Voodoo, or to call it by some of its proper names, _vodun_ or _vodu_ , is a time-honoured religion. What Johnny Ames is doing is an abomination outside the realm of the gods and spirits," Rupert says sharply. Then, more quietly: "The problem is that I’m not sure what that abomination entails. He’s carrying a small figure he’s twisting for his own purposes, there’s something nagging me about strings.... did any of you notice anything I’ve missed?"

"He walked funny," Shanice says. "Like he didn’t have any rhythm of his own. Guy who can play like that, he usually moves in his own harmony, but this son of a bitch didn’t....Oh. Sorry, Blind One."

"That’s right. When he walked away, I thought of a badly operated marionette," Anya says over the Blind One’s chuckle, and then looks at Rupert. "I find puppets extremely creepy."

"You are so very right, darling." Rupert’s appropriately serious. "And I saw the same thing – by which logic suggests that perhaps Ames isn’t the origin for the darkness we’ve encountered."

"Johnny Ames is a creature of the devil, man. Don’t trust him, don’t fucking _trust_ him," Terrence says. He slaps his hand against the wall like he’s going to slap somebody or something else.

The guitars on the walls begin to sound, not from their strings but their depths, resonance coming from the heart of each wooden body.

"Terrence, please come here." The Blind One’s voice is soft, but it’s enough to calm Terrence, get him moving in the right direction toward the boss. The guitar strings begin to vibrate. "Rupert, what else did Johnny Ames say? If you had to concentrate his message, what would it be?"

Rupert considers this with his whole body – Anya can see thought circulating like blood, then concentrating in. This is weird but not unusual, because like Buffy says, he is very thinky. Most of the time, anyway– if Buffy says jump, he doesn’t think but says automatically ‘where do you want me to land’....

Before Anya can upset herself with useless bitterness over a dead issue, Rupert says, "‘Everybody’s got to be somewheres.’ He said this twice."

Lindsey shrugs. "It’s an old saying. Lyrics of a country song a few decades back, for example...."

"Somewheres. Multiple," Rupert says more slowly. "He also said ‘somewheres might surprise you’ – but he never used the singular form."

The guitars on the wall sing – one note, together, lifting and fading at the same time – and fall silent.

The Blind One says quietly, "That, I shall consider. Johnny has never been a good man, he stirred the mud in many a swamp, but he wouldn’t cross this line. The living and the dead....the present and the absent. Yes, somewheres indeed."

Terrence stands at his elbow, focussed on his real task again – he hands the Blind One his cane, then pulls one of the chairs over so that the boss can sit down, steadies him into the chair. "What else do you need, Blind One?"

"Two things from and for Rupert." The otherworldly voice is tired now. "First – Shanice is the only one untouched by Johnny, is that right?"

"I don’t know what ripped my jeans leg," Rupert says, factual as if he’s already back to writing Council reports. "It was bad magic, I believe, and bloody nasty, but not necessarily tied to Ames. However, he has my name, and he did touch McDonald and Anya." With that, he takes her hand and squeezes it.

"So Shanice is likely safe, thanks to your quick thinking. ‘Do not touch, do not touch his leavings’ is an excellent rule with evil sorcerers." He lifts his hands in benediction. "And...we will keep our Lindsey and our Anya safe as can be."

She should find that soothing, but she doesn’t. She really doesn’t.

The Blind One continues, "Second – what is this about your Slayer’s phone call?"

"Oh. Right." Rupert looks unhappy. "There seems to be, er, strange phenomena in and around Bath, where I lived for several years. The New Watchers’ Council has learned of someone there – a witch who was ostracized by her coven for ‘practices unfitting,’ for causing harm of some undefined kind. I met her in passing once, and Buffy would like me to talk to this woman. Er, Rosamond Hills."

"Buffy wants you to go look up an old witch friend of yours?" Anya silently curses the very high soprano in which she says it, she _hates_ that voice.

"Not like that, darling, I met the woman _once_ ," he says, as his grasp tightens on her hand. "Willow would be the obvious choice, of course, but she’s on retreat in Tibet. The Watchers nearby are either still in training or quite busy with the bloody enormous number of Slayers –"

"So, yep, Buffy wants you to go look up an old witch friend of yours," she finishes.

"Anya, for—"

"Enough." The Blind One taps his cane on the floor. A thrum comes from the wood – floor, guitars, furniture, shutters to keep out the bad – and then eases.

"I’m sorry, sir," Anya says, shoving down all the bad feelings into small, crumpled, hopefully non-recyclable balls. Then she rests her head on Rupert’s shoulder. "Sorry, honey," she says more quietly. "It sounds like exactly the kind of thing you’re good at."

The cane spins now, and the guitars hum again before the Blind One says, "So, my dear child, I shall give you the power here. Whatever you speak, I shall agree to – should you wish Rupert to stay, so he shall stay. He once might have been the Watcher of the senior Slayer, but he works for me now."

He’s used the word ‘wish," Anya thinks. That’s a clue, and she follows the thread not very far to its ugly, ragged end. Vengeance isn’t justice, and to choose to keep him when he wants to go, where the job requires, cuts too deep too many ways.

"Rupert will always be Buffy’s Watcher, Great One. It would be wrong to keep him from helping her. Let him go."

She can’t understand why the hell Rupert still looks unhappy.

.....................................................................

With his worry-talisman Giles rubs idly at the pain between his eyes – opening himself up as he did at the Bloodknot can give him a headache, especially when he’s gazing at evil – and then shifts his weight, uncertain where to go now that he’s booked his flights.

He stands by himself in the middle of his and Anya’s main room, while she busies herself in their bedroom. After they came home after their work-discussion at the Blind One’s, she announced that he’d need clean clothes for England and she’d start a load of laundry. He told her he could do it, at which point she snapped so hard that he decided the better part of valour was to let her do what she wanted. However, he can hear her slamming things around in an alarmingly violent way, which suggests he chose wrongly.

Bad choices are his speciality, he thinks, and he shifts his weight again.

After Anya gave her blessing on this bloody trip to England, the Blind One closed the meeting with a promise to contact Lindsey and Anya with the results of his ‘considering.’ Then they all joined hands, a practice which still discomfits Giles somehow, and he and Lindsey sang their Blind Willie Johnson song again. _Let it shine on me, let it shine on me...._

"Damn it," Anya says. He looks up to see her righting herself – she must have stumbled, carrying the laundry basket.

"Love, do you need any help?" Not the best way to put it. "Er, _may_ I help you?"

"No." Arms loaded, she fights their front door open – their washer and dryer are down in Magic Places’ storeroom, for ease of laundering various cloth goods she sells and for difficulty of everything else – and then starts down the stairs. Her belated "Thank you" floats back up.

He follows to the door and calls, "I think I’ll have a nightcap. Do you want anything?"

"Whiskey-and-water. Lots of water. Ice."

To get to the kitchen, he must walk past the outer wall of windows, each with its own sun-catcher. The colours against black glass distract him, make him think of red reflecting evil through a half-empty bottle, and as always the street noise bleeds through. He brings down the new Roman shades for privacy and protection, and then goes into their new kitchen.

It always takes him a minute to orient himself in here. When they renovated, adding the flat next door to their space, the kitchen was the last room to be finished, and sometimes he forgets where everything is in its new space. Not that such forgetting happens only in his and Anya’s kitchen – Christ, he doesn’t want to go back to England, his earlier attack of stupid nostalgia notwithstanding.

But he walks away from that thought. It serves no purpose.

He gets two tumblers down from the cabinets, fetches the whiskey, makes the drinks – just a drop of liquor for Anya, as she prefers what he thinks of as coloured water, and quite a few drops for him. Then he wanders back out into the main room. Her drink he sets down on the coffee table; he carries his own drink to the bookshelves and the stereo system.

Six CDs are in his CD changer: Warren Zevon, Richard and Linda Thompson, Blind Willie Johnson (of course), Richard Thompson again, Robert Johnson, and...Stevie Ray Vaughan. The live album, he thinks dryly, how fitting. He’ll listen to the real version of "Voodoo Child"and ease the memory of Ames’ desecration of the past; he’ll rely on the Blind One, and Anya and Lindsey, to ease the captured soul’s torment. The world will be put back together somehow, he hopes.

The first notes are playing when she comes back up, and she says "Oh, God," in the voice she reserves for minor evil, such as tax-collectors, bad customer service, and the more guitar-heavy selections in his music collection. He quickly turns the music down so that it’s just an undercurrent of the blues. She says, "I’ll start your packing. But remember that you’ll need to pick up your shirts at the dry cleaners’ tomorrow before you go, at least if you want to take your favourite one."

"I’ll pack for myself tomorrow morning, Anya," he says. "Now, there’s your drink–"

She’s already swooping down on it. "Thank you, honey," she says after she takes a big swallow. "But we shouldn’t put off the important jobs, we have a lot to do and not much time--"

"Stop, stop, for fuck’s sake." This comes out more harshly than he intends, and he winces when he sees her expression. "Darling, I’m sorry. It’s just... I’d much rather spend the rest of my evening with you than with the sodding suitcase. I didn’t mean to bark like that, please forgive me."

And there’s an Anya-smile, more tentative than he likes, but it’s there. She comes to him, teases her fingers through the grey at his temples (which gesture sometimes irritates him, but now feels like mercy), then kisses him lightly. "No big deal. I get that the crankiness is from the omnipresent mystical threat and your increasing dislike of travel."

"My increasing dislike of leaving you," he corrects her. "I’d ask you to come with me, but even besides the Johnny Ames problem, the Halloween sale season will be upon us before we know it."

"My honey," she says, before laying her head on his chest. He brings his arm around her.

Time in their flat slows. He can feel Anya’s breathing, feel the warmth of her body and his own steadiness in supporting her, feel the cool, polished boards under his bare feet. He can hear the real Stevie Ray singing, and the tick-tock of Felix the cat-clock nearby, and the hushed pops of ice in whiskey and water.

The _somewheres_ of his fears, England and Texas, Buffy’s task for him and the threat of Ames, transform into _here_. Rupert. Anya. Peace.

He doesn’t know why it makes him want to bloody weep, unless because it’s so transitory.

Anya says into his shirt, "I’m sorry for barking, too." She looks up at him, eyes wide and dark. "It’s just... the old fear’s like a zombie, you know? Because I know you love me, but then Buffy calls, and it’s your sacred duty to go, but it’s also Xander pushing me aside and then leaving me, and it’s Olaf, and...."

"And suddenly the reanimated corpse is up and dancing." He kisses her. "I know just what you mean."

She gets on tiptoes to kiss him back, kiss him better, and he has to shift his weight to accommodate her. He is happy to find equilibrium for them both, so happy to be here. Then she settles back down and says in her matter-of-fact way, "Thing is, those reanimated corpses stink. Let’s not even talk about the way body parts drop off, either."

"Are we speaking literally or metaphorically?"

"Both." She smiles at him.

He smiles back. Then, smile fading, words he didn’t know were there: "Sometimes the fear reeked even before it became a corpse."

"Okay. That’s metaphor, which means you’re upset again." She catches his free hand. "We know what I’m scared of. What’s your ugly dead thing?"

"Anya–"

"Come here." She tugs him over to the sofa, gets them both curled up together, allows him to have another couple of sips of his drink while she does, and then she says, "Right. Now I know you hate to talk about your feelings, but can you give me a clue? You know, like a parlour game! Charades, maybe – how many words, how many syllables, whatever."

"That’s not really necessary, darling."

"Well, then, go right ahead. Speak!" – the full, irresistible Anya-beam and open hands, which always melt his heart.

Still he does, in fact, hate to talk about his feelings, especially when they’re this surprisingly raw. Staring down into his glass of whiskey, he remembers that horrible year in Sunnydale after he’d been fired: he had been...unmoored, drifting in the long hours he wasn’t needed. There had been so many hours he wasn’t needed. Anya and the Magic Box had given him purpose where his Slayer hadn’t, couldn’t – it hadn’t been fair to expect it of Buffy, which lesson he’d learnt with pain. But then she had died, and he’d come unmoored again, and when he’d tried to anchor his life in his own work in England, it had been seen as...had _been_ , he supposed, a betrayal of his returned Slayer. And then the last year in Sunnydale, and after, when he’d returned to Dallas and Anya....

He says, taking care with his words as he’d failed to do with Buffy, "You told the Blind One tonight I would always be Buffy’s Watcher, and that’s quite true. But I am not _just_ her Watcher, and I, er, worry that she and the others will forget that, as they’ve done so often in the past. Worse, if I’m not her Watcher, I fear to them I’m nothing." He takes a drink to get him past the last bit. "I worry that I will forget as well – not that I’ll forget you and our life here, never that – but that I’ll go back to old expectations, bad old ways, that have long since died and been put to rest."

"Well, gosh. That _is_ a big stupid zombie fear, just like mine." She smiles at him with such gentleness – Christ, he pities the stupid sods who didn’t realize what she is, and he thanks whatever powers there might be that he does. Then she taps his chin with one imperious finger, which is equally his Anya, and says sunnily, "Dance, sucker, dance!"

He puts their unfinished drinks on the table before he begins to tickle her, which of course she fights. They wrestle each other into a giggling, intertwined heap on the sofa, a tangled skein of bodies and love. Then – "to honour the metaphor," he says – he allows her to choose a couple of those loathsome ballads she enjoys, and she lights the candles, and they dance close and slow. Although he has little facility in the terpsichorean arts, he manages to sway with her to the music, manages to caress her back and arse as they move. Manages to slip his thigh between hers and shift her until she’s on tiptoe, riding his leg, her hands on his shoulders and her head dipped back in pleasure.

When the songs end, she puts her arms around his neck and twists her lower body against his rather painfully confined erection. When he exhales hard, she does it again. He says, "Bedroom, I think."

"Why wait that long? What’s wrong with here?" she says, wriggling.

"Because–" he brings her closer for a kiss, long and slow, despite the tremble in his legs – "the toys are in there."

She surprises him. "No toys tonight, okay? Just you and me."

"Right. Just you and me, love."

But after blowing out the candles and turning off the stereo, he takes her into the bedroom anyway. It’s still hotter in there than the rest of the flat, so he turns on the ceiling fan. Its breezes make the long, dangling strings of the wish-catcher over the bed flutter and swirl.

He takes off each item of her clothing – top, bra, skirt, knickers – slowly, exposing her cream-and-gold skin to the breeze and the brush of his mouth. When she tries to move under his touch, however, she gets a spank on her bottom and a murmured command to stay still. This happens several times – she’s not very good at obedience tonight, he thinks in lust-filled amusement, or maybe she just doesn’t want to be.

Once she’s naked (and he’s taken off his shirt and undone the buttons on his jeans, lest he hurt himself), he seats himself on the bed and draws her between his spread legs. As he intended, this presents her back to him, especially her shoulders, and with mouth and hands, he kisses away any memory of that bastard Johnny Ames’ touch in the bar, draws invisible protection on her skin in case of a second meeting. _Mine_ , he says in every way. _Keep safe._

By the time he’s satisfied she’ll be warded, his cock aches. But it’s worth it.

She turns then, slippery-damp and determined, and they’re wrestling again but to a better end. She pulls his jeans and boxers off, kissing the shin below where the denim has ripped and then following down to his foot. He’s ticklish there, his woman knows too well, and he escapes her hold and then pins her in turn to the bed. His hips are already moving, sweet friction of his cock on her belly, before he gets one of her hands above her head and wraps the fingers around the iron bars of the bedstead.

Her other hand works down between them, and when her thumb traces around the head of his cock and rubs just below, his good intentions of sexual teasing are lost. That wicked hand is wrapped around the iron bars too, a pillow goes below her hips, and he’s sliding into such delicious heat and wetness, she’s gasping out her first pleasure and digging her feet into his back, he’s going deeper still, moment after moment, and it’s all heat and slickness and here, Rupert and Anya in the present.

When he lets himself come at last, after she’s seized around him once more, the long, dangling strings of the wish-catcher above them flutter and swirl even more madly. He can hear it, even if he can’t see for the pleasure.

They get up after a few minutes of boneless rest, do their various water and bathroom and locking-up routines, and then return to bed. It’s dark now, and unconscionably steamy-hot again, but they spoon together regardless. His hand flattens on her hipbone, his fingers loose against her, as he falls asleep, thinking, Mine. Safe.

In the middle of the night, however, he wakes himself up to go to the loo, and at some point in his wavering journey he remembers that they didn’t put the clothes in the dryer. Yawning, he stumbles downstairs – literally, because in thinking of jobs past and future, he forgets the last two steps are there, and he falls heavily, painfully, onto the rough industrial carpet.

And as he lies there, scraped and hurting and embarrassed even though alone, he says to himself, "Ah, yes. Dance, sucker, dance."

The rest of the night, he dreams of red eyes and nibbling teeth and the snap of heavy strings.

........................................................

The next morning Anya wakes first, enjoying in a vaguely depressed way the sunrise through their bedroom window and her man’s long, solid warmth beside her. She likes this part of the day, but she knows how desperately she’ll miss him when he’s gone.

A perfect time for morning sex while they still can, she thinks, and she rolls over to explore his naked body. Her fingers trace over his chest and belly, dance over to his arms –

Where the heels of his palms are badly scraped. When she moves closer, she can smell the last traces of antibiotic cream.

Further investigation reveals small wounds on his knees and a reddened line down his shin. He didn’t have them when he went to bed – "Rupert! Wake up!"

"What? Something wrong? Am I late?" he says thickly, levering himself up on his elbows. When his palms touch the sheet, he winces.

"You’re hurt," she says, even as she adjusts his posture so he’s not rubbing his scrapes raw. "And I wasn’t informed."

"Oh, Christ." He falls back onto his pillows, sighing heavily.

"Don’t say ‘Oh, Christ.’ Say, ‘Anya, this is what happened,’ filling in ‘this’ as appropriate."

He gives her a one-open-eyed glare, but says, "Fell down the stairs accidentally, in the night. I mean, I went downstairs on purpose, to shift the clothes into the dryer, but...."

"You _fell_. You went downstairs _in the dark_."

"That’s what I said, darling."

She counts to ten. Counts to a hundred when that first thing doesn’t work. If she can’t trust him to take care of himself when he’s in their home, how the hell can she trust him in England? And how can she trust Buffy to watch out for him, when last night he enumerated all the reasons she wouldn’t....

Freakouts are unattractive and unproductive, she tells herself.

Before she can frame a gentle reminder that he’s not allowed to get killed even by accident, his mouth is on hers, his wounded hands around her face. She lets herself open to him, drops easily over his chest, sinks into the morning kiss, harsh and soft at the same time. As they kiss again, she sends one hand down and grabs his cock, which despite his other injuries seems fine and dandy. Hard.

"Want to have sex despite your stupidity?" she says when she can.

"Yes, let’s."

But first he pulls her up further – a small noise when her leg accidentally touches his scraped knee – and kisses her breasts, pleasing her with lips and tongue and the slight abrasion of his stubble on her skin. She’s moaning and (carefully) wriggling long before he positions her, slides her down and lets her take him in. The sex is good and fast and hard, the pace controlled by his fingers on her thighs, the pleasure-moment strong enough so that she almost forgets how worried she is.

Almost.

The rest of the day follows the same pattern of careful re-balancing. After breakfast and showers and folding of laundry, he follows when she goes downstairs to prepare for the business day; he restocks the first two shelves of the Halloween goods for her until she shoos him back to his packing. Of course he gets lost in his library instead, looking up spirit-catchers and trying to find a misplaced book about legends of Somerset (which is pointless anyway, as even the exploded Watchers’ Council probably has a copy), so she has to go upstairs and shout at him to finish packing and remember Dawn’s present and also pick up his cleaning.

When she gets back down to the shop, Lindsey is walking through the door. "Hey, darlin’," he says as usual. But there are dark half-circles under his eyes. "Spoke to Terrence and the Blind One just now."

"Oh? About our research job?"

"Yep." He hands her a latte from the good coffee shop down the street, then gives her a piece of paper. _Vida Fabrics and Beads, Mornings and Afternoons Only,_ it says, and there’s an address in South Dallas not too far from the Bloodknot. "The Blind One wants us to wait til tomorrow – he’s doing some meditation thing tonight, wouldn’t say more – but he’s asking us to purchase a Cord of Life from this fine establishment."

"A what?"

"A Cord of Life. Interesting," Rupert says from the stairs. When she looks at him, he says hastily, "I’m off to pick up the cleaning, love. But first... the Cord of Life is extremely rare. Not a totem of Voudoun, though. Not part of a well-defined magic system at all, but, well, a blessed rope, in essence."

"Never heard of it. Blessed by whom?" she says.

"That’s the thing. I’ve only come across a few references, and the source of the Cord’s power is never mentioned." He plucks the paper from her hand, scrutinizes it, then gives it back to her. "But of course we can trust the Blind One. And, er, Lindsey, why don’t you walk with me?"

She finds something suspicious in the way Rupert pushes Lindsey out the door – male secrets annoy her – but with so many damn bunnies hopping about in the grass, what’s one more. She turns back to her accounts and tells her zombie fears to lie down and shut the hell up.

Her shop assistant Suzanne arrives promptly after lunch, which means Anya can drive Rupert to the airport. The long, glaringly bright journey is marked by two separate arguments: one about his calling-and-reassuring-Anya schedule (when he reminds her that he can’t use his cell in England, she has to explain how and why that’s a bad thing for Stateside partners, and how he needs to borrow one there); the other about his stupid belief that she must take special care when Cord-shopping tomorrow. The second tempest lasts until they hit Grand Prairie. Once they’ve both bellowed, however, they hold hands until she pulls up to the kerb in Departures.

He reaches over for a long, sweet kiss, and she breathes him in for a moment, wrapping her hands in his shirt in a fashion that might be construed as desperate. He kisses her again. "Be good and stay safe, my love. I’ll ring you tomorrow afternoon your time."

"Be good and stay safe, honey," she echoes, and she watches him get out of the car with his bags. Then, shouting after him: "Honey, did you pack your hat?"

He says, "I love you," and shuts the door with some emphasis.

It’s too quiet in the car without him, too cold. It’s ridiculous to miss him this soon, she tells herself as she drives off.

Once back on the freeway, she turns off the air-conditioner, turns on the radio. Maybe she can catch an early edition of _Marketplace_ on the NPR station–

But on the first station she hears that horrible song, the voodoo-child song, its guitar so sharp it almost cracks the windows. It doesn’t sound right.

She pushes the reset button. Same song.

Reset. Same song.

It’s everywhere. _Somewheres_ , she thinks, trying not to panic, trying not to remember chill hands on her shoulders or something ripping at Rupert’s leg, trying not to remember vengeance-tricks of old.

Then she pushes one more button, and it is _Marketplace_ , stocks are up, and she’s okay, it’s okay.

She gets off at the next exit, drives into the first fast-food place she finds, and slams into a parking space. She turns off the radio. The song still plays in her head, louder and louder, even after she turns off the car and scrambles out, shivering, into unseasonable heat.


	3. Chapter 3

Riding down the escalator at the Gatwick railway terminal, Giles is shoved forward so hard that he almost falls.

He glances back to see an American tourist hovering. "Dude, I’m _so_ sorry," the young man says, before, driven by the weight of his backpack, he stumbles further down again.

Giles twists to steady himself from this second assault. His scrapes open, and he lands heavily – but on his feet, not on his arse, thank God. He accepts the git’s renewed apologies, then limps to the waiting express.

Before he gets on the train, he lifts his face to the early morning, taking in what was home. The day’s cool, grey, damp, and heavy – what he remembers, no longer what he’s used to. It hurts when he steps up and in.

He doesn’t nap on the short ride into London, although he’s suffering from sleep debt and jetlag. For one thing, he’s still considering the Johnny Ames problem. Yesterday before he left, he not only threatened Lindsey with a spot of GBH if Anya came to any hurt while he was gone, but mentioned that it might be a good idea to examine Stevie Ray Vaughan’s grave out in Oak Cliff. At that McDonald looked thoughtful and said he might research Stevie Ray memorabilia as well, see if any had gone missing. Giles wonders how that search is going. It’s after midnight at home, however, so he can’t really call.

He wonders if Anya’s sleeping on his side of the bed (as she says is her habit during his absences), her lovely body curved into his pillows, safe and sweetly dreaming. Or possibly she’s using her vibrator, her heels sliding against the mattress, her body arched, and, he trusts, his name breathed in her high sex-pleasure moan.

He looks outside at mist burning off and green rising in the near distance, makes a fruitless wish. Then he turns his thoughts back to work.

The New Watchers’ Council headquarters is housed in a rambling four-story residence not far from the High Street Kensington Tube station. After he pays the taxi driver, he goes through the gate, steps over a broken flower pot festooned with dead chrysanthemums, and rings the bell. Through the door he can hear a bit of that hiphop noise, female voices shouting unintelligibly, and then a familiar male voice –

Robson opens the door. "Yes?" he begins, then breaks off into a smile. "Hallo, Giles. Do come in, you’re expected."

They exchange pleasantries as Robson leads the way past two public rooms. On the stairs are a couple of extremely young Slayers playing a video game. "Remember you have weapons practice at ten, Chloe," Robson says genially, then says to Giles, "You remember, this is primarily our Watcher- _Slayer_ headquarters. We’ve a small library here, I’ve already pulled a few books for you, and here are a few archivists’ offices, but we’ve put most of the collection we’re rebuilding and its staff on the other side of Kensington Gardens, with some of the operations oversight. This is the training and logistics space for both halves of the team... and the house where a dozen of our newest Slayers live, as well as Faith when she’s in England and of course Buffy, now that she’s settled down."

To the first floor now, and Robson turns them to the right. Although Giles knows the generalities – Xander’s in Africa with Faith, he and Willow also sharing their own pied-a-terre nearby when not travelling – he asks, "Where are Dawn and, er, Spike?"

There’s an answering shriek as Dawn hurtles herself out of a room at the end of the corridor. "Giles! Hi, big guy!"

When she leaps into his arms, he holds on. Since the fall of Sunnydale Dawn has visited Dallas twice, staying for several weeks the second time. She and Anya shopped for vintage clothes and ate out and did "girl things" which somehow involved shoes-buying after yoga, and he spent pleasant hours talking with her about her plans for this gap year, her beginning research into Slayer origins, and his work for the Blind One. They’ve kept in regular contact since then. It’s a chance to redress the mistakes he made with Willow, he sometimes thinks, perhaps a chance to begin again in a larger sense. And, of course – "Hang on, Dawn. I’ve been charged with an important delivery."

"Did Anya _find_ one for me? That’s so cool!"

"She did indeed." He digs around in his briefcase until he finds the ribbon-tied sack, and he presents it with some ceremony. "The, er, designer...thing you wanted. Don’t ask me to be more specific."

"Of course I wouldn’t stress you out like that. She’s taught me well," Dawn laughs.

She’s already undoing the ribbon. When it drops in a swirl of red onto the carpet, from behind his eyes an ache starts to spread – which intensifies when he hears his Slayer say, "Look at that mess! Good going, Giles."

Robson mutters something about getting the research material, fades discreetly into the background. Giles doesn’t pay much attention, however. He looks at Buffy instead.

She stands at the end of the corridor in front of a window, its light a silver nimbus around her head. As befits one of the old saints, she looks rather stern until she smiles. He’s not seen her in a year and a half, although he’s made a point of keeping up phone calls with her as well – she’s brown and fit, perhaps a little rounder than she had been at her most worn. Closer to that girl he first met, he thinks, and yet still quite far away.

He is the first to move, even if his aches make him awkward. She follows, and they share a hug, if not as easy as his with Dawn’s. It is their first since...well, he can’t remember. The end of Sunnydale wasn’t a time for embraces.

When they step apart, Buffy slips past him to get his suitcase. "Are these two all you brought?"

"Well, yes. The task you have seems fairly, er, limited in scope and time required, and I’ll have to get back soon...."

"Sure. I understand."

"You called, Buffy, and I’m here," he says quietly. The words hang in the air like notes from the Blind One’s guitars, surface and depth, resonance from small things.

Dawn breaks the moment, for which he’s profoundly thankful. After picking up the ribbon, she grabs his arm. "You’re here, yep, and it’s great! I’m just sorry Anya couldn’t come with you."

"I’m sorry too. But it’s a bloody busy season at the shop, and we’ve been thrust into an ugly case of our own, I’m rather worried...." he says as he’s dragged along. "Still, tell me about all of you and how you’re doing."

"We’re fine." Buffy takes the ribbon from Dawn and twirls it around her fingers, then leaps ahead to the door at the end. Before he can go in, however, she flicks his ear – "Giles, you have an _earring_! A _hoop_! Um, did you eat any weird candy bars recently?"

Dawn giggles, and he says, "No...well, I had a Cadbury on the plane...but to answer your real question, yes, it’s mine. Anya likes it, so I rarely take it off any more."

"But really, it’s not your kind of thing." Buffy flicks at it again.

"Yes, it’s mine," he repeats, then walks into the conference room where he spies – "Hullo, are those Jaffa cakes?"

"Yes, Buffy bought them for you. But Anya emailed me the scoop about your last checkup, so you only get one now and one later, like at teatime," Dawn says. "Especially if you gobbled chocolate on the plane." She lets him drop his briefcase, then pushes him into a chair at the long table before she heads off toward the teapot.

"Thank you, Buffy, a perfect breakfast," he says, taking his allowed portion. "And, er, Dawn, when did you get Anya’s email?"

"Couple of hours ago. She was going to bed early, because of the scary radio thing and Lindsey–" She catches herself.

Too late. "Tell me, please."

"No big, so don’t get weird. There was some Stevie Ray Vaughan song-barrage on the radio after she dropped you off, and it scared her because of your case? But she says it’s all good, except then Lindsey found that Stevie Ray’s grave had been disturbed. Cupful of dirt removed."

"Ah." He folds his hands together, interlocks his fingers, tries to ignore his lurch of terror. This particular zombie bears dead Jenny’s face, which drops off to reveal Anya’s.

"Are you okay, Giles?" Buffy says. When she touches his wrist just above his commitment band, he sees the red ribbon in his peripheral vision. It curves in on itself like rose-petals, like a rope of blood....Dear Lord, he’s shaking.

"I’m fine, thank you," he says, and he takes a bite of Jaffa cake and accepts the mug of tea Dawn gives him.

Robson and his assistant, a young woman named Grantham, come into the conference room bearing folders, but only Giles and Dawn are given one. When Buffy sees this, she says, "Robson, no! We talked about this!"

"‘No’ what?" But then Giles understands. "So I’ll be taking Dawn on this information-gathering mission?"

"Yes," Dawn says, and " _No_ ," Buffy says, and Robson says, "We rather thought you might. If it doesn’t bother you too much, or if you don’t think it will hamper your efforts–"

"I need to know a bit more about these ‘efforts,’ but I’m not opposed in, er, principle." He thinks of his conversation with Anya – a day, two days, how long ago? Time is coiling together, one strand touching another so that it’s hard to distinguish days and years, but he remembers his vow to avoid past mistakes. He says to Buffy, "However, I understand it’s not my choice to make."

"She’s not going! And if I have to lock her up when Spike and I go off and battle the slime-monsters of Tooting Bec tomorrow night, I will."

"God, Buffy, we’ll just be _talking_ to this Hills witch-chick if we find her. If you weren’t so frightened of, you know, conversation with actual human beings–"

"Dawn, go to your room," Buffy snaps.

"Yeah, well, you go stick your over-dyed Slayer head–"

Giles tunes out the sororal argument; he knows who’ll win, anyway, as no one is more intransigent than Dawn when she chooses. He opens the regrettably slim folder to look at his briefing information.

The ‘strange phenomena’ Buffy mentioned on the phone is covered first. Apparently magic-practitioners in Wiltshire and Somerset have been targeted by a petty thief – quite a few ritual robes and embroidered scarves have been reported stolen. This in itself isn’t worrying, but shortly thereafter each theft, the owner of the lost magic item has fallen mysteriously ill, and then begun to act in out-of-character, menacing ways. There are unsubstantiated rumours that graves have been despoiled in the vicinity.

In his mind Giles hears again the Blind One. _Johnny has never been a good man, he stirred the mud in many a swamp, but he wouldn’t cross this line._

Before he can turn to the next page, Robson says over the still ongoing Summers battle, "It really isn’t a very nice situation."

‘Not a nice situation’ – Giles almost smiles, thinking about Robson’s similar reaction to the news of the First two years ago. But– "No, it isn’t. But haven’t you anyone locally who could investigate? Or, if you don’t trust the new Watchers alone, did you contact Elizabeth Harkness and her coven?"

Robson looks about nervously, lowers his voice. "We have a few promising new hires in the Council, ready to try their wings, but... Buffy insisted that you were to be called."

"How odd," Giles says.

"Perhaps because Dawn had evinced an interest in investigating? Who knows, but she is the Senior Slayer, her words have weight. And, ah, Miss Harkness refused to help. She said that it wasn’t her task, that the augurs pointed to you. Not by name, but she was sure."

For _fuck’s_ sake -- "Why wasn’t I told of this earlier?"

Robson starts to answer, but from outside the conference room there comes a familiar vampire’s growl, "Would someone shut the bloody drapes! Hard to join in and get the news if a bit of sunshine’s in the way, innit?"

Buffy shouts back, "All right, Spike, just a sec! But we’re not really news-ing yet, Giles is doing his whole inhaling-knowledge routine."

Robson shrugs and sits back as Dawn goes to the door. No answers from him, then.

Giles represses both anger and pain – he’s really feeling the journey now, as well as the falls of the past days -- and turns the page. Here is the Watchers’ basic information on Rosamund Hills. He knows he met her once at the opening of a now defunct magic shop in Bath, but he can’t remember anything beyond a rose-coloured cape and wispy hair escaping from two braids. Right: she’s in her late thirties, cast out of Gillian Jones’ group three years ago....

The next line rises up at him, black as the grave. _‘Rosamund Hills is skilled with thread. Before her disgrace she was known as much for her weaving as for her proficiency on the guitar.’_

......................................................................................

Anya stares at the email from Rupert and sips at the morning cup of tea, brushes her hand over the cash register, pats the cash drawer.

The damn email doesn’t change, regardless of her good rituals.

He’s attached a factsheet about the Cord of Life for her: four blessed strands, blah blah, usually cord of gold and silver, blah blah, used in ritual as guide or symbol, blah blah. Also, in Rupert’s usual email style, highly condensed because he hates to write on a computer, a note:

_Darling, all’s fine here. Going to Bath tomorrow with Dawn to interview victims and seek Rosamund Hills. Background states she is a weaver and a musician._ This doesn’t make Anya happy. That kind of coincidence is a rabbit in... not just the grass but the basement, a sign of a monster nearby and evil everywhere.

_Mystery also involves an unknown person or persons disturbing gravesites, as does Lindsey’s find. Take all care. You promised._ She thumps the monitor in lieu of thumping him. He sneakily hasn’t made the same promise, and she’s not forgotten it.

_Love you, long for you, thinking of home. Yours, Rupert._ Ho. Not even that ending – she’s always happily surprised by how much mushier he is in correspondence than in conversation– is going to make this all right.

She has just hit Send on her scathing reply (with affectionate and pornographic postscript, because she loves and longs for him too) when Suzanne comes in from the stockroom, arms full of pumpkin-slug candles. "Anya, isn’t it time for you to meet Lindsey and them? Your errand?"

It’s almost ten-thirty. "Yep, thanks, Suzanne. Can you handle the customers by yourself?"

Her assistant rolls her eyes. Then, as a group of regulars jangles the bell on their way in: "Hello, everyone! Mrs Montega, we have your special order ready...."

After Anya greets the customers and goes over the sale specials, she leaves through the front door. The morning’s already hot, already bright, and their street smells of tar. A crew works down at the corner, their machines hammering and belching smoke by an ugly pothole.

Putting on her sunglasses, she looks around again, searching for Lindsey’s lawyer car (he told her he didn’t plan to drive his truck). What she sees is more surprising. "Ruth!" she calls as she hurries across the street. "Did I forget it’s a delivery day?"

Terrence’s daughter rarely leaves her house, and even now she’s hiding herself in the shadow of the canopy of Blind Willie’s, her embroidered handbag wrapped around her body like a shield. Anya thinks, as she often does, that Ruth’s long-gone abuser could have done with a proper vengeance. But Ruth manages a smile. "Hi, Anya," she says, then adds, after a visible struggle, "No, Dad told me that you and Lindsey were going to Vida’s, and well, I’ve bought my materials there for years. So I thought you might have better luck if I went too."

"You’re going to help us investigate? Even though you’re scared of people and the world in general?" Anya leaps onto the kerb and pulls Ruth in for a fast, awkward hug. "You’re a hero."

Ruth’s dark cheeks almost blush, and she pulls her handbag even closer. "Oh, go on."

"If you want me to... I bet you’re doing this because Terrence is so _not_ a fan of evil Johnny Ames, and you’re here to help your dad heal. Ruth, you’re–"

Before she can finish her compliment, Lindsey saunters through the door. "Hey, y’all, right on time." He takes Ruth’s arm in a gentlemanly way, then winks at Anya. "Ol’ Giles has given me strict instructions that you’re not to get hurt or anything, but darlin’, I don’t dare offer you the other arm. It might get taken the wrong way, and I’d hate for him to fly back over the Atlantic to kick my ass." He settles his own sunglasses on his nose. "So let’s go, ladies."

She’s still trying to decide whether the male attitudes both near and far are welcome or obnoxious when they arrive at the rundown, half-empty strip mall in South Dallas where Vida Fabric and Beads is located. But when she looks around, all surface irritation transforms into more shivers.

It’s not the fabric shop itself – Mardi Gras beads and crystals dance behind the picture window, and cloth of gold drifts behind that. But there’s a darkened shopfront two doors down, its windows blackened with more than an absence of light, and she can feel bass from that direction booming underneath her feet. "Um, you guys? Do you know what that’s supposed to be?"

Ruth looks over. "No, I don’t. Used to be a vacuum-cleaner place, went out a couple months ago." After wiping her hands on her floral skirt, she steps up to the doorway of the fabric shop and pushes a button at the side. "Ruth Jackson," she announces. "And, uh, two friends. Anya Jenkins and Lindsey McDonald."

Mariachi music bursts out of speakers above the window, then a husky female voice says, "Ruthie! Honey child, you come right in, and bring these new people!" The music stops, and the glass door opens.

Lindsey says in an undervoice, "Okay. I’ve got the Blind One’s credit card and a purse of gold he gave me this morning–"

"Great, but I’ll do the haggling," Anya says, as they approach.

He shoots her a funny look. "Darlin’, I’m the lawyer here. Negotiating is my business."

"And _I’m_ in retail, you idiot, and have a thousand years more of magic experience." She pushes him on. "It’ll all work out. That’s why the Blind One sent us."

And then they’re inside a riot of colour and luxury and cleanliness. Rolls of fabric line the walls, reaching to the ceiling, and in the middle of the shop is a table full of tiny trays from which shine circles of gold and silver and funky colours, arranged by size. A counter runs along the back of the room – there’s an open arch, leading to more veiled treasure – but what Anya focusses on are the two white-haired women perched on stools behind the counter. She’s never seen any creature, human or demon, festooned with as much costume jewelry as these ladies, but she also notices the good spirit-talismans scattered over them, the rings, earrings, bracelets....

Ruth says, "Miss Vida Lee, Miss Vida Ann, here are Anya and Lindsey. They, um, work for the Blind One."

"I’m the manager of Magic Places, which stocks Ruth’s wish-catchers. She gets her material here, right? It’s excellent quality," Anya says, snapping her business card on the glass.

The taller, younger one on the left – Miss Vida Lee, Anya thinks – nods and picks up the card. "We hear good things about Magic Places, don’t we, Vida Ann? And not just from Ruthie."

"We do, we do. Hear tell it’s a place of the light." Miss Vida Ann carefully slides another bead onto the string she’s doing. "Any friend of the Blind One’s a friend of ours."

When Lindsey steps forward, the old ladies send each other significant looks. Miss Vida Lee says, "Well now, little Miss Anya looks like she’s made the right choices after a long dark night, set her foot on the path, gonna climb to glory. But you, now, Mister Lindsey – you made up your mind yet? ‘Cause I think you still livin’ with a cloud round your heart. You got to walk yourself out of that bad space once and for all, boy."

"Hush, Sissy Lee. Pay her no mind, sonny. Old girl says the same thing to Mister Luke Spencer on the TV every evening when we’re watching our stories on tape, she’s cracked." Miss Vida Ann adjusts her glasses. "Say your say."

When Lindsey hesitates, Anya puts a hand to his back. He says formally, "Miss Vida Lee, Miss Vida Ann, the Blind One sends his greetings. Ruth is our guide, but Anya here and I have been charged with buying a rare...."

"Cord of Life," Anya finishes for him. "We’d like to know your terms, to do a deal if we can."

The old ladies drop their hands so quickly that beads spill over the counter, go everywhere. With a soft exclamation Ruth bends down to collect the lost ones – Anya catches glimpses of gold, silver, and red heaping up in the palm of Ruth’s hand.

What’s weird is that she can hear that bass from the darkened storefront again. It sounds unpleasantly familiar somehow, and way too close.

Miss Vida Lee fans herself with the Magic Places card. "Cord of Life, huh? What you want with that?"

"The Blind One needs it," Lindsey says quietly. He’s gone smaller somehow, his hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth.

Anya adds, "He hasn’t told us yet how he wishes to use it, but we do know that he wants to deal with a bokor named Johnny Ames. Do you know him?"

More beads scatter at his name. The bass underneath Anya’s feet hammers harder, and melody begins to intrude. Oh God, ‘Voodoo Child. Slight Return.’

Miss Vida Ann says crisply, "We do indeed know him. He’s been a good-for-nothing all his life–"

"But now, Sissy Ann, it’s worse. That man ain’t _right_ , and he’s too close for my liking," Miss Vida Lee says. "So the Blind One’s going to fix him?"

"So we hope. And he’s too close? As in, just down the strip?" Anya says.

"Yes, yes. He hides in the daytime, only comes out to do little mischiefs until dark, throw his voice and pick at the seams, but seems Miss Anya knows where he is," Miss Vida Lee says. "So it’s Miss Anya who needs to go into the back. If you can find the Cord of Life in that mess, honey child, then you take it with our good grace."

Before Anya can slap the newest zombie fear away, Ruth puts her collected beads in a bowl and then says, "May I go with her?"

Anya recalls all the times she’s walked alone, all the times she _should_ have. Take it back, she told D’Hoffryn, and she’s going to keep on saying it. Besides, the task is just walking into a storeroom – "Ruth, I can do it by myself. You don’t have to."

Miss Vida Ann says slowly, "I think she does. I think, Ruthie-girl, this is what you’ve needed for too long. You hold onto Anya, and you two go a-walking. Walk yourself out of that bad place."

"And you, Mister Lindsey, stay with us. We’ll talk about clouds round people’s hearts while we wait," Miss Vida Lee says, and her hand reaches out and grabs Lindsey’s wrist. It’s the red-ringed evil one, Anya sees. "You girls go on now."

Anya grabs Ruth’s hand – it’s clammy, trembling – and walks them both around the counter and through the arch. When they cross the threshold, an invisible curtain of beads strikes their faces. It is suddenly very cold. Very quiet.

"Have you been back here before, Ruth?" Anya whispers. She doesn’t know why she can’t speak louder, but it doesn’t seem right.

"No." It’s a thread of sound, snapped off.

"Okay then. It’s okay." Anya pats Ruth’s hand, then looks around.

Freezes.

Liquid cascades down the walls, a pour of ugly colours, bad-blood red, swamp-green, death-black. The floor is flat, dark, no-colour different from black, and whatever’s silently rushing down disappears into its fabric without leaving a mark.

"This is what Arashmaharr looked like. D’Hoffryn’s great hall, I mean." Anya can hardly breathe.

"No. No," Ruth says. "It’s where _he_ hit me. Where he left me. It’s...." A swallowed-up sob, then, "I used to live here."

In the midst of her horror Anya considers what she knows of magic and illusion, makes conjectures about the nature of somewheres. She does long for Rupert – he’d know, he always knows – but she says, "Okay, Ruth. I bet it’ll get worse before it gets better, but let’s just keep going."

"Okay. Walk out of the bad place." Ruth’s other hand covers their already clasped hands.

Four strands in the Cord of Life, that’s what Rupert’s note said. Anya puts her other hand on top of their link – four hands intertwined – and they take another few steps. She hears crying, screaming, accusations, God it’s like her first time to sing for the Blind One, they’re lurching up and coming to get her. The walls cascade with blood, swamp-water, death. Cries, screams, curses, grabbing hands. Her feet sink into the floor like she’s walking on black sand....

But across her back there’s a good fluttering, like kisses, like protection, and she helps herself and Ruth on.

One more step, and they’re standing in an ordinary concrete-floored stockroom, lined with strings of beads, tassels of all descriptions, thousands of cords. The walls gleam in gold, silver, and funky colours under buzzing fluorescent lights, and through the open arch Anya can see the Misses Vida talking to Lindsey, hear a murmur of the real world.

"Oh, _Anya_ ," Ruth says, all but in tears.

"You made it, sweetie. Once you get through the ugly stuff, you always get the shakes and feel like throwing up. It’ll pass." Even as Anya says this in her matter-of-fact way, her gaze scans the walls for their goal.

There, in the corner – two ropes, both made of gold and silver. Singing comes from the ropes; to Anya it sounds like Rupert when he’s reading on the couch, relaxed and happy, humming to himself that Blind Willie Johnson song about the light.

Only one rope will be the Cord of Life, though. This one, or that one. This, or that. Or. Or. Or.

She and Ruth move closer, and the singing is stronger, she can hear the words now. She closes her eyes, trying to distinguish from the sound alone. She envisions Rupert on the couch, smiling at her.

"This one," she says. They lift their still joined hands, and with her index and middle fingers she pulls the right one, and the singing swells.

..........................................................................................................

Giles drops the curtain cord he’s been idly playing with, but he doesn’t move from his window. Too tired.

Having politely declined the offer of a dormitory room at the Council, he’s staying on the tenth floor of an American-style business hotel right by the High Street Kensington tube. The view from above in twilight is estranging; landmarks sink away, except for the darkness in the near distance which is Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park.

He rests his hands on the glass. It soothes the scrapes on his palms, although it doesn’t do anything for that lingering soreness from the Bloodknot visit and his falls.

This morning was devoted to work – in the midst of once familiar noise from Buffy and Dawn and Spike, he reviewed some materials about soul-taking and methods of stealing lifeforce, tried and failed to reach a couple of contacts in Bath, and sent off the information on the Cord of Life to Anya. (He checks his watch: too early to call her, she must still be on her own investigation.) There was lunch at the Council-house, but he was too weary to eat much, and that Andrew boy from Sunnydale, now a Watcher, wouldn’t stop talking in his bloody foolish way about serious business. Call a Sucogh a Sucogh, Giles thinks now, not a ‘slimy slime-beast’.

After lunch Giles escaped the Council. He checked into his hotel, slept badly for a couple of hours, then went out alone to stretch his legs. His walk took him to Kensington Gardens, wrapped in illusory isolation and quite real green: he circled the Round Pond, then ventured through the trees until he reached the Albert Memorial. That insane, over-decorated monument to dead love gleamed even in the grey, its gilt showing silver around the edges in the fall of afternoon light.

Then came a scream loud enough to make Giles almost fall again, as he reached for weapons he didn’t have. When he turned, two huge cats burst out of the underbrush. He didn’t know which was chasing which, or what they were running from, or.... But before he could formulate a hypothesis, they were gone again, feral shapes lost in the grass.

So tired. So sore.

He checks his watch again. Almost time to be at the pub as arranged; still not time to ring home. After catching up his jacket, he heads for the door. On the way, however, he touches the red ribbon Anya had used to tie Dawn’s present, which now lays on the desk next to his worry-talisman, his folder, and his laptop. He doesn’t know why he took the ribbon, other than it comforts him. Ridiculous superstition.

The pub is only a few streets away – a step below a gastropub, but nicer than most locals. When he walks in, he sees Buffy and Spike waiting in a quiet corner, drinks in front of them. They’re alone... but locked together, shoulder to shoulder above the table, tied elsewhere by strings he can’t see. He doesn’t have to see the strings to know they’re present, however.

When he gets to the table, he doesn’t sit. "Hello, Buffy, Spike. Is Dawn not joining us?"

"Hi, Giles. And she said she was sorry, but she and Andrew went to a lecture at the British Library. Something dead language-y," Buffy says. "My sister’s grown up to be a nerdy Watcher, you know?" As if hearing herself for the first time: "I mean...not that it’s _bad_ –"

"I know what you mean, Buffy." He’s amused by the old insult, one that would have stung him once. "Er, have you ordered anything besides your drinks?"

"No. Spike, I want fish and chips – you go with Giles to order mine, okay?" She presses Spike’s hand.

"Reckon I can manage it," Spike says with elaborate casualness, and he pushes himself to his feet. That’s a new jacket, Giles notices: it’s black leather like the foul old duster, but shorter and cleaner. Still, Spike does that over-the-top twitch with it as in the old days, and he says with the same emphasis, "After you, Rupes."

The pub is busy tonight, the bar understaffed, and Giles leans on the bar to wait his turn.

A hesitation, then Spike does the same. He pats himself down as if to search for cigarettes, hands moving restlessly, before an explosion: "Right, so I’m ready for the inquisition."

"Inquisition?" Giles says mildly.

"Look, know we weren’t exactly chums...ever. Know you don’t approve of me and Buffy, showed that clear enough that last year in Sunnydale. So–"

"Much has changed since that last year." Christ, isn’t that the stuffiest way to phrase it, Giles thinks, wouldn’t it make Anya snort. Striving for ease, he says, "What I’d like to know, really, is about that year in Los Angeles. Those months you apparently didn’t contact Buffy, those months you worked with Angel."

"You want to know about L.A.? Why the fuck... _why_?" The tosser is so gobsmacked he forgets to keep up his usual tough-guy manner.

Giles hides a smile. It’s not that funny, anyway. "I’m curious about your choice. And, er, I’d like to know if you met my colleague Lindsey McDonald, there near the end."

"Lindsey. Yeah, he showed up with this magic coin he’d got from your Blind bloke, Wes got it to open a magic safe that had some pretty weaponry, also magic...McDonald had the whole good mojo working. For some reason it made Angel want to rip out his throat." Spike shrugs. "Some pushing and shoving between them, some singing with Lorne, and then McDonald took off into the California night right before the battle. Made Angel even madder."

"Why is that?"

Spike looks down at his hands, picks at his wrists. "Don’t think Angelus much believes in redemption, or a change of heart. Not really."

"Do you?" Giles says. The bartender walks by at that moment – he tries to catch his attention, but the man just waves at him, mumbles something about a moment or two, and disappears into the back. When Giles turns back around, Spike is still picking at his wrists: snap, pull, rub out the mark; snap, pull, rub out the mark.

"Do you believe in redemption?" Giles asks again.

Spike doesn’t answer for a moment, long enough for Giles to take in the normal bustle of a night down the pub, think about the difference between home and here. At last he says, in a voice Giles has never heard before, "In L.A. I did a lot of thinking. It wasn’t until...a thing happened, not going to say more, that I really understood what I’d done all those years. Evil." He flattens his hands on the bar, goes vampire-still. "In Sunnydale after the soul... it hurt _me_ to think of the bad old days, remorse eating at me like an acid-bath. Felt bad about not being good enough for Buffy. But in L.A., I thought about others’ hurt. What they had felt like."

Spike’s staring straight ahead at a row of glasses – for the first time Giles realizes Spike’s angled himself so no one can see his lack of reflection in the mirror behind the bar. Old habit, no doubt. It would be hard to figure out who one is without reflection. Just as hard to figure it out with too much, too.

Spike says suddenly, harshly, "Once I started, I remembered the strangest bloody things. Like... the same time I killed that Slayer in New York, I met another fierce human girl. Not a Slayer, and not pretty as such, but a sexy punk bird. She was a spark in the night, that one. So I captured her and took her home to Dru. Drank from her, tortured her, fucked her, and then finally turned her. Left her, telling her she was a survivor." He bows his head. "We met up later, shagged and slaughtered our way through Rome, and more....but she was just Sunday, just another girl turned vamp. Didn’t _care_ about her."

"What happened to her, do you know?"

"Buffy staked her. First year of college for the Slayer, it was, but she knew enough to clean up my mess." Spike looks away. "In Los Angeles I remembered Sunday, that spark in the night, and more like her. I remembered to name her, and care."

"So you do believe."

"No, I– well, yeah. Suppose so."

"I just got the time frame wrong," Giles says almost to himself, remembering his suggestion to Spike years earlier that the chip might mean a higher purpose. Then he leans over the bar and grabs the bolting bartender by the shirt. "Sorry, mate. Might we give you our order?"

Once their food order’s done, once Giles gets his pint, he and Spike head back to the table, through noise and chatter and smoke. Spike is silent, until he says, "Right, Rupes, I was expecting a few more...teeth-marks from you. You giving me and Buffy your blessing?"

"I hardly think either of you gives a toss about my blessing," Giles says easily. "I won’t ask you any more questions, don’t worry."

"But you didn’t ask me why I came back to her," Spike says. "Or why she let me."

"I don’t need to know. Only she does." Giles takes the last few steps into light and slides into a seat across from Buffy.

"Aren’t you going to sit down, Spike?" Buffy says. There’s a note of unflattering entreaty in her voice. Giles feels suddenly sure she doesn’t want to talk to him alone.

But Spike, usually so percipient when it comes to her, doesn’t focus. "I need a bit of air..." he says, before realizing the idiocy of that statement from one who doesn’t have to breathe. He waves his hand. "Sorry, pet. Back in just a bit." After he puts the numbers for their orders on the table, he leaves in a swirl of leather.

Giles sips his pint. When he sees Buffy sink into herself, he fights a similar urge – and, putting aside his drink, he says, "When we’ve spoken, you never really said... did you enjoy your travels? How did you find Rome?"

She smiles. "Big. Smelly. Pretty. Old. I dated an immortal guy, and when we broke up, the world didn’t end – which made a nice change, you know?" And then, in a flash of insight he should have learnt to expect, "Rome was a place to think about history. All kinds of things that had gone, all kinds of things that were saved."

"Yes. A worthy expense of time."

"Yeah, but something I’m not great at. Anyway, what about you and Dallas life?" She leans forward, and he’s struck again by the warm traces of who she’d been, recovered now from death and apocalypse. "You’re so not a Texas sort of guy, Giles."

"In some ways, no. The weather’s absolutely horrible much of the time – too hot, too cold, er, changeable – and the traffic’s unspeakable. The political climate is appallingly retrograde." He wraps his hand around his drink, feels the smooth glass on his scrapes. He says more deliberately, "But I have work which challenges me, which draws on everything I know, which makes me... more. I have a home, and friends, and music. And Anya’s there. I’m happy in Dallas."

"That’s what Dawn says. She says I wouldn’t know you guys any more." A sting in her words, a balm in her smile. "Of course, she also thinks that rock-star earring suits you."

"We’ve so enjoyed our visits with her, and look forward to more. We’d very much enjoy a visit from you as well."

"Better ask your girlfriend before you go issuing invitations. Last time we spent any quality time together, I was running a sword through her."

Despite everything he smiles at her phrasing. "She’s my partner, Buffy, not just a girlfriend. There might be some, er, initial awkwardness, but Anya is Anya. She moves on, best she can, and her best is very good indeed." When Buffy doesn’t say anything – still that old dislike, then – he tries again. "Dallas suits us. It has its own history, darkness and death and demons of its own, but the relationship to the past is...less weighted there." He touches her hand lightly. "It’s the frontier, you know, where one starts afresh. Didn’t you study that in school?"

"Like I paid attention! You know that, Giles," she says, but she touches his hand in return. Then, "I’m glad you’re here, even though it took a witch’s foretelling and old-school badness to get you across the Atlantic."

"No, Buffy. You called, and I’m here."

The moment hangs heavy like swamp air, just as it had this morning. Because he can sense the zombies starting to lurch out of their graves, because he’s too sodding tired to deal with any more now and his shin is starting to throb, he turns the subject, which she leaps on happily. They talk about the new Council. They argue a little about his taking Dawn to Bath. They make room for Spike at the table when he comes back, and they discuss the nest of Sucogh she and Spike have been battling, will be again tonight and tomorrow, and they eat their food when it comes. It goes better than he expected.

He excuses himself early, however, pleading exhaustion. Before he pushes on the pub door, he stops and looks back. Buffy and Spike speak quietly to each other, leaning in, lips to each other’s ears, hands linked on the table.

He’s still thinking of that tableau when he gets back to his room, and he goes directly to the phone. The phone card he’d bought that afternoon briefly baffles him, but he manages, and he’s immediately rewarded with her voice. "Magic Places. Where can we take you?"

"Do you really want me to answer that, my love?" he says, grinning, as he falls onto the bed.

"Rupert! Honey, did you get my emails?"

The grin fades at her sharpened voice. "Sorry, I’ve not checked my webmail yet. What’s happened, darling?"

"We found the Cord of Life – it was a small, unpleasant quest, and I thought of you to get me through it. But when we left the shop with the Cord, we found a dead cat on the hood of Lindsey’s car, with grave-dirt all around him. Ritual slaying. Johnny Ames was nearby, but we didn’t see him. And I wouldn’t let Lindsey turn on the car radio, because I didn’t want to hear that damn ‘Voodoo Child’ song again."

From the hail of words he chooses the most important: "But you’re safe? Is the Blind One meeting with Ames, then?"

"Ames said he can’t tonight. Probably too tired from slaughtering felines." Anya’s voice is scornful, but it doesn’t hide her fright. "We’re all supposed to meet with him tomorrow night at the Blind One’s."

"You’re going to be there too?"

"Oh for God’s sake, honey, stop with the obvious questions. Yes, I’m safe although terrified, and how are you? The Blind One specifically asked about you and your well-being."

"I’m fine." But his leg does hurt, he thinks. He manoeuvres himself around and pulls up his jeans leg so he can look at it –

Where the unseen force in the Bloodknot touched him, the reddened line has changed into a small, oddly shaped, angry wound. It looks like...Dear God, it looks like a guitar pick has been burned into his skin.

"I’m fine, darling," he repeats. "Everything’s fine."


	4. Chapter 4

Giles sleeps badly again. 

Part of it’s the natural effect of moving through time and space in a way a body’s not built to move, exacerbated by his various aches and mystical wounds. Part of it’s his difficulty in sleeping without Anya – before he can truly rest these days he requires her warmth, her kicks and little snores and blatantly unfair attempts to steal back the bedclothes he takes by right of conquest.

But nightmare also jolts him awake several times, biting off pain-noise. It’s not necessarily mystical or encrypted – he’s always trapped in a maze that he already knows how to escape. He’s put himself back in the hedges, and he has to remember the right way out before the unspecified monster at its heart tears his throat, before he bleeds like a river. 

It’s a guilt-dream he’s had throughout his life. He doesn’t care to consider why it’s reappearing now.

However, the vision lingers through his morning preparations, breakfast, shower, the bandaging of that strange pick-shaped wound, and a quick email to Anya. He stares at the message for a moment before he hits Send. No, he doesn’t want to think about why he might feel guilty.

Dawn’s waiting for him, bouncing up and down outside the High Street Kensington Tube station, her breath a cloud in the cold. The Circle and District lines are buggered – "like always," she says cheerfully – and no other lines stop here. After they argue alternate means of transportation, trying to figure the routes both above ground and buried, he takes matters into his own hands and flags a black cab. 

The cabbie takes the route that leads through the Royal Parks. When the taxi stops at a crossing near the South Carriage Drive, Giles sees two huge cats staring out of a shrubbery wall, hears over the traffic noise two wild feline screams, sees the green wall shiver as if something else is inside.

"What’s wrong with those cats?" Dawn asks, but the taxi moves on, the sign is left behind.

He’s still thinking of the things in the hedge as he and Dawn get out at Paddington, buy their tickets, and find their train. The shivers stay with him as they pull out of the station, as they pass through dingy industrial spaces and graffiti-ed brick barriers, as they escape into the country.

Dawn’s listening to her iPod contraption – "the Libertines, they’re sort of punk, like your old music!" she says to him, and then slumps down in her seat, her toes flexing against the seats in front of them in time to the private melody. He goes over the notes for their schedule – two cold calls on affected persons, herbalist Genevieve Lee and mage Dunnitt Smith, whom he’s met, and two shops which Rosamund Hills used to frequent. The material isn’t enough to hold his attention, however, and soon he’s staring out at the Thames Valley. He’d once known every hill, every road, every twist of the river they passed.

As the train comes into Oxford, he turns his head to catch a glimpse of grey towers, now half-hidden by new landmarks. He spent time here, he ran from here – and as the train pulls away, he remembers an afternoon tea in his college rooms with his parents, who’d come up to visit him. He had been already dabbling in magics then – had to hide an athame and a forbidden grimoire as well as his water pipe before they’d arrived – and had been struggling with a fucking horrible hangover to boot. He’d leant against the window, hands pressed into the glass to keep himself standing. Mother had interrogated him about his health, Father about his studies, and through it all he’d repeated, _I’m fine. Everything’s fine. Don’t worry about me._ That’s where it started, he thinks.

The train shudders out of the station, and he looks down at his hands. The scrapes are fading. _Dance, sucker, dance._

When they reach Swindon, the usual Sod’s Law of British rail travel takes hold, and they’re turfed out to wait for another train to Bath. The delay makes him so uneasy that, once he and Dawn find a bench on the platform, he rearranges himself so he can get his worry-talisman out of his pocket. He needs something, anything – 

But Anya’s red ribbon falls out of his pocket at the same time, curling itself into the semblance of a rose on the wooden bench. 

"Hey," Dawn says, picking it up. "You’re carrying Anya’s ribbon?"

He flushes. "Er, yes. I just–"

"Is it because of... _superstition_?" Her face shines with merriment. "Are you _superstitious_ now? Or just sentimental?"

"Be quiet, young woman. You’ve spent far too much time learning secrets from Anya."

Giggling, she leans against his arm. "And she’d say right now that you need a stronger reminder of her so you don’t get so stuffy. Hey, I know – give me your arm. No, not the one with the commitment band, the other one."

"Am I allowed to ask why?" he says, even as he extends the designated limb.

Without speaking Dawn takes the ribbon and starts to wrap it around his wrist, pushing up his jacket and shirt sleeves as she works. On the third loop she begins to weave the ribbon into the base, over and under and over. 

There is power here, he can feel it. Whether it’s because of Dawn herself – he wonders sometimes what aspects of the Key hide within the bright teenaged shell, what gift might manifest in the turn of a hand or a turn of a page – or it’s traces of Anya and home, the ribbon almost hums against his skin. It’s warm, it’s good. His various aches begin to dissolve away, even from the wound on his leg. 

But the green wall still rattles, leaves starting to shred in sharp teeth. It’s always been love and duty with him, he thinks. Those are the sources of his lies.

"All done," Dawn announces, as she ties the knot.

"Very, er, professional." He eyes the corded result. "I suppose I prefer this new hobby of yours to cookie dough and boy bands, but it’s a near-run thing."

"Oh, Giles," she says indulgently, and turns her iPod back on. He passes the worry-talisman from banded hand to banded hand, watching the eternity symbol reflect grey, then red. This time red is a good thing.

Once they’re on their way to Bath again, however, she takes out the ear-pieces and begins to reread their notes. "Which way do we go when we get off the train?" she says.

"Up. We go up," he says. 

"Up, right. So do you think we’re chasing someone messing with the _gros bon ange_ or _ti bon ange_?" she says, naming the parts of the soul in the Voudu religion, the larger life-force, the smaller personality. "Except, isn’t the timeframe for the proper re-collection of a soul, like, after a year in the underwater place?" 

He thinks of what he’s read, then thinks, with a sickening fall, of Willow’s using the Urn of Osiris to call back Buffy from heaven. "Yes, but I don’t think that’s the kind of death-magic we’re dealing with," he manages. More slowly, as he remembers dangling strings from a pocket: "I’m not sure if we’re dealing with truth or puppetry, Dawn."

"Both can hurt, though, right," she says. He nods. 

They ride in silence the rest of the way.

When they get off the train, the hills of Bath encircle them. He remembers this landscape too, and the landmarks that have stood far longer than he’s been alive – the Baths and the ribbon-curl of the River Avon below, the Abbey higher, the Crescents and hilltops over that. Dunnitt Smith’s home is the highest of the four sites they need to investigate, and Giles steers them that way first. He used to walk this way to his own flat, although that seems like a lifetime ago. The gleam of Bath stone has aged into softness, and it’s as if they pass through clouds of cold.

Smith’s flat is above a sweetshop – it was the site of the magic shop that went under, largely because of mismanagement and lack of retail focus. (Giles has learnt well from Anya.) He’s been here once or twice, including the time he met Rosamund Hills. Smith’s day job was at the Roman Baths, administrator or some such, but he collected human oddities at various cocktail parties and gatherings; Giles is still not sure if _he_ was one, too.

The private door cut into the shop’s side swings open, held tenuously by only one hinge. Beyond rise blackness and the smell of damp. 

"Should we go in?" Dawn says, a little nervously.

"Why don’t you stay outside here," Giles says. It isn’t a question. "I don’t like the looks of this."

"Wouldn’t Anya say I should go in with you?"

"No," he says – although she would, obviously – and he steps over the threshold alone.

The private staircase is an warped thing, its fabric decayed since he was last here. From the sweetshop comes the flow of music, classical...no, opera. Puccini. Christ, he remembers, he remembers.

The ribbon around his wrist winks red in the gloom. But he feels fluttering against his skin, like kisses, like protection, and he begins to climb.

Each step is a memory. He lied to his parents because he loved them, because he didn’t want to disappoint them. He lied to Jenny because he loved her, because he didn’t want her to see who he was. He lied to Buffy on her eighteenth birthday because it was duty, and he broke the lie because he loved her, but it’s always there. 

The ribbon around his wrist winks red, and he hears a scratching noise in the walls, claws on leaves. The only light comes from a window above.

When he makes the turn on the landing, he sees a torn piece of paper caught in a crack in the wall. With great caution he takes it, holds it up, scans it. It’s a printed picture of a small figure – child? No, when he looks closer, he sees the thin tracery of strings dangling from the figure’s arms and legs.

Scratching again from above, claws on leaves. The music from below swells into pain.

He fumbles for his worry-talisman, makes himself breathe through bad dreams and bad memories, lets himself look. It’s empty now – Dunnitt Smith isn’t here any more, hasn’t been for some time – but evil has traced itself like puppet-strings along the walls, along the stairs. It’s following an old, dark pattern....

The source of all his lies is love and duty, he thinks suddenly, but what follows is always the darkness. He’s got to find another way.

After knocking on Smith’s door – no answer – he turns around and jogs down the stairs. Dawn hovers at the threshold, peering in. "What? What did you see?" she says.

"Nothing. Well, this paper, which might be suggestive. Tell me what you make of it." He hands it to her, then hesitates. "Dawn, also...I would of course pay you back, but do you still have your mobile with the international access?"

"Yep! You want to call Anya?" She’s already digging into her backpack for the phone. "It’s like five in the morning in Dallas, though."

"I know," he says. "But I told her an untruth, and I need to correct my mistake."

.................................................................... 

There is nothing good on television at five in the morning except the Bloomberg crawl. It’s a vengeance thing, Anya’s convinced.

She pushes the Off button on the remote, throws the remote on the coffee table, and then throws herself back down on the sofa. She could sleep here if she could sleep, which she can’t. 

She blames Rupert.

Oh sure, he said ‘I’m fine, darling,’ when they spoke the night before. This reassurance allowed her enough peace to invite Consuela and her husband Jaime, and Michael and his new lover Brick (which is apparently a made-up name referring to a character in a play by Tennessee Williams, but whatever), to come over after the shop closed and have pizza and listen to Stevie Nicks very loud. Brick is very good at a sort of modern-dance interpretation of "Stand Back," he even mimes the whole drooping-shawl aspect of her performance. But food and company didn’t cheer Anya for long. 

She’s drowning in worry about Rupert, and Johnny Ames, who Terrence said disappeared somewhere last night before his scheduled set at the Bloodknot, and then Rupert again. Even his latest email reply didn’t make her feel easier about him, despite his inventively smutty postscript.

She puts a cushion over her face to smother her impulse to scream "Rabbits" very loud. It wouldn’t do any good, and in fact might conjure up the fluffy little horrors.

The ringing of the phone scares her so badly that she almost jerks apart. Trembling, she gathers herself and then jumps for the phone. "Yes?"

"Hello, love." Rupert’s voice sounds like he’s speaking from the bottom of a well. "I’m sorry if I woke you–"

"Honey! No, I’m up, I’m up. Are you all right? How are you calling?"

"Dawn’s mobile. But the charge is almost gone, so I need to make this fast."

"I knew it! What did you do now?"

"Nothing," he snaps through the static, and then, "Well, actually...Anya, I’m so sorry, but I, um, misled you last night when you asked how I was."

Despite the night-heat, she shivers. "Go on."

"I didn’t want to worry you. But I should have said, nevertheless, that the mark from whatever it was at the Bloodknot has, er, changed. It’s now rather like a burnt spot, about the size and shape of a guitar pick."

" _Rupert Giles_!"

"I know I should have told you before. But truly, it only hurts a bit, well, perhaps more than a bit. I’m sorry."

She hurts more than a bit, too – he lied to her, no matter what the stupid male reason was, and the zombies are stirring. But she can tell from the guilt in his voice he means to tell truth now, and anyway he’s not within punching range, and they’re fighting technology. She contents herself with, "Okay. Great. Great. I’ll tell the Blind One that you’re _not_ fine."

"Thank you, darling. And are you all right? Any news?"

"Johnny Ames has gone underground, and I’m okay. Pissed off at you and upset, but okay."

"Now, Anya–" He wisely stops himself before he can get himself into worse trouble. Then, as the connection begins to break up, "Tell the Blind One we found a paper, an image of a doll or puppet... strings...." The phone hisses at her. "...Love you, so sorry...." 

She’s left with a dead connection and a useless tool in her hand. Dawn’s mobile won’t work any more, she guesses.

She needs to not freak out. She needs to tell the Blind One.

The boss often stays up late, but they’ve reached the break point where night meets day. She doesn’t know if she should call or go by, if he’s even awake. The Blind One’s life when not receiving visitors is a mystery to her. He lives behind those shuttered windows and that bolted door, and he controls all openings, and that’s just the way it is for an exile. 

Or maybe he lives in somewheres too.

Even as she thinks this, she runs to their own wall of windows. She’s left the middle of the three shades open to let in the night – see what’s coming, that’s her motto – and she presses her face to the glass. The lamp behind her blinds her, however, it bounces reflection, so she throws open the window to see the real night in front of her, to feel a change in the wind. 

Their street is as silent as it ever gets, although out on the nearby interstate the trucks still run, the commuters are already pouring in. Through the shutters of the Blind One’s windows, there’s an outline of light. But there’s also a dark...thing under the canopy of Blind Willie’s. She thinks of Johnny Ames disappeared, she starts to retreat– 

"Is that you, Anya?" comes Terrence’s voice.

"Well, of course. Why are you lurking here at this hour?" she says. "Shouldn’t you be at home asleep? _Do_ you sleep?"

That ex-football-player bulk emerges onto the kerb and into the harsh buzzing white cast by a streetlamp. With almost no syrup left in his deep voice: "Not when that Johnny Ames devil is still abroad, girl, not when he could be sliming by with the bad totems and the bad heart."

"But, Terrence.... No, wait. Rupert called just now with possible information. Is the Blind One available, can I come report to him?"

His gesturing hand is enough of a sign for her.

Her workout clothes and running shoes will have to do – obeying a voice in her head, _hurry hurry_ , she grabs her keys, and sprints down the stairs. When she reaches the bottom, she thinks about poor Rupert falling that last night. Makes a good wish. Runs faster.

The wards and locks are easily dealt with and redone from the other side, and then she bolts across the street. She’s not looking where she’s going, no time – 

When two grey and gold shadows streak in front of her, she stumbles, can’t catch herself. At the point of impact, though, a large warm hand catches her arm and pulls her to safety. "Watch it," Terrence says. "Damn neighbourhood cats, always where they shouldn’t be."

She hangs on for a minute. "Thanks, Terrence. I didn’t really want to split my head open. It wouldn’t be pretty and I don’t care for pain."

"None of us do, girl. None of us do." He ushers her in through the door, and then shuts them in. 

The club’s smoke-edge lingers even hours after close, and emergency lights are their only guide. Passing through darkness gives her a chance to catch her breath before saying quietly, "Terrence, you’re not hanging around in front of Blind Willie’s because you _want_ Johnny Ames to come by, are you? You were scared, and now you’re not, because you’re in the mood for vengeance after all these years?"

He doesn’t answer at first, just ushers her to the bar. In the dimness the bottles of liquor reflect weirdly against the mirrors, and when he pushes on the secret door, there’s a flash. He says, "Maybe I am, Anya-girl. Maybe it’s time Johnny Ames got what’s coming to him." 

"Hold it right there." She grabs him by the lapels of his jacket, even though she has to reach up to do it. "Speaking as an ex-professional, you do _not_ want to invoke vengeance on this guy. Even outside the myriad bad results likely, do you want to put that burden on Ruth? Think about where the vengeance goes, okay? Because it _always comes back_." Her words frighten herself, and she steps back, saying weakly, "Unless you get reprieved, of course. And you can’t count on that."

Terrence touches her shoulder, murmurs something soothing, then leads her onward.

They climb the stairs in silence. It’s cold in here, more than just air-conditioning. It feels like her distant childhood memories of autumn and the first blasts of wind from the north. She’ll have to check the forecast when she gets back home – a front might be coming.

Terrence stops them both on the top step. Across the office, the Blind One’s door is half-open. Lights flicker from inside, but she can’t see any movement, can’t make out any shapes. 

"Is that my dear Anya?" the Blind One calls. "My child, walk to the threshold, but don’t come in. And, Terrence, my friend, go home. You heed what Anya said to you." 

"Good hearing," she whispers, more deeply chilled even though she shouldn’t be surprised.

Terrence sighs. "Yes, Blind One. I’ll be back in a few hours." He touches Anya’s shoulder again as he turns. "We’ll see each other this evening, Anya. The devil’s coming at seven, just as the dark comes."

Anya breathes in, and then more lightly crosses the office toward the flickering light. She suddenly feels how stupid it was to run over here for such a small thing, but anyway, here she is – "Great One, I’m sorry to bother you, but Rupert just called me, and you asked me so repeatedly if he were all right, and so.... whoa!"

She can see inside now. The Blind One sits in a chair in front of his table, with a dozen burning candles circled on the floor in front of him, something glimmering in the midst of the candles. Another step closer, right to the edge, and she can see the shining thing is the Cord of Life, laid out in what looks like an unfinished double loop. Just a bit more, and it would be the symbol for eternity.

The Blind One’s not wearing one of his suits. Over a white shirt and dark trousers he has on a ceremonial robe of some sort, she thinks. Its fabric is like the Blind One’s skin – ebony until it moves, a shimmer of subtle greens and blues. It makes him look even bigger somehow, as if the room, the world, isn’t enough to contain him, as if he’s moving under the material. Yes, this is somewheres.

He’s resting head and hands on his cane, staring with wet, stitched-up eyes at the Cord of Life. "Hello, Anya," he says in his normal, tired voice. "Tell me more."

"Of course. Sorry, Great One, I was distracted by the ritual trappings." When he chuckles, she continues, "Okay. Rupert called with two salient points – there might have been more, but we got cut off. First, or rather second, while investigating he found a paper or a card or something that has the figure of a doll or a puppet, there were strings. That might be important."

"It might be, indeed. But what of Rupert himself?"

"Okay. See, he _lied_ to me yesterday–" cut the shrillness, she tells herself, domestic difficulties aren’t important here – "he’s not really fine. The mark on his leg he got at the Bloodknot is changing, Blind One. It looks like a guitar pick now, and it hurts him, and he’s _still_ out there working, the fathead."

Boy, she hadn’t known she wanted to cry. Impatiently she dashes away the first tears.

The Blind One raises his hand. "Let us not resort to petty insults, my dear child." He’s laughing now, and the guitars on the wall hum in response. "Because you have done very well, and your Rupert has done very well. _This_ is what I’ve been waiting for. We will be able to finish our path, I do believe."

He lifts his cane over the flickering lights – the wood looks different now, alien material alien colour – then touches its tip to the gleam of rope. Hands on the doorjamb for balance, she rises on tiptoe to see.

The Cord slides forward, and the knot of eternity is complete.

"Of course," the Blind One adds in a frighteningly light tone, "it shall take an ugly sixteen hours or so to get there."

............................................................................

"Do you want the rest of my bun?" Dawn says, pushing it across the small table. "It’s kinda too heavy for me."

"Oh, so you believe that heaviness suits _me_ ," Giles says, and he pushes the remnant of the cream tea back at her. After the phone call he’s easy enough in his mind to joke: "No, thank you. I’m not risking Anya’s wrath any further today."

Dawn makes a face at him. "Guilt, guilt, guilt," she says, and then smiles. "Thank you for this, anyway. Buffy would be so totally jealous."

He looks around at the bloody twee establishment which Dawn had read about in some guidebook and insisted they choose for their lunch. It doesn’t really seem like Buffy’s sort of place. "Why? Do you think we should take her a bun as well?" 

" _No,_ Giles. ‘Cause...it’s hard to explain." Dawn waves her napkin as if in surrender, then gets up from the table. "Where do we go next?"

Although he’s puzzled by her oblique reference, he lets it rest. They do need to get back to work. After they make their way through the obstacle course of tables and into the grey afternoon, he says, "Well, we’ve done what we can to reach the contacts–"

"Not that reaching can be accomplished, what with the whole eek-gone-missing problem," Dawn interrupts. "But I do like the gift Ms. Lee’s sister gave me." She pulls the sprig of rosemary out of her backpack and waves it around. "‘There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.’"

"Yes, well done, but–"

However, Dawn is in full, unstoppable theatrical flow (for which he unreasonably blames Andrew). As they begin to climb, she spins around, chanting, "There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me; we may call it herb of grace o’ Sundays. O, you must wear your rue with a difference.’"

Rue makes an odd herb of grace, he thinks, as he always does when he hears these lines. He pushes forward into the lunchtime crowd on the pedestrian street, saying, "Do you consider Ophelia a good model for a Watcher?"

"That’s all she did, poor thing, besides go crazy," Dawn says cheerfully. "Thanks to the Powers and the suffragettes that _real_ Watchers do more!"

"Not always." Before she can take him up, however, he adds, "I think we should visit the first of the two locations where Rosamund Hills has been seen." He fumbles for his notes, then squints at his writing. Behind his words, the slip of paper he picked up from Dunnett Smith’s edges out, sharp and discoloured. He re-focusses: "It’s a newish shop of some indeterminate kind, called the Note. On Saville Row – there was another shop there at one time, I just can’t remember."

"That’s what the rosemary’s _for_ , Giles," Dawn says.

Smiling, he takes a leaf from her offered sprig and crumbles it into his hand. The scent rushes up at him, stronger than the palm’s-worth of powder warrants. The scent lingers.

They climb out of the broad street into an older, narrower walk. Shops here are so tightly woven together that it’s difficult to see much above one’s head. It’s a row of antique shops, of others’ treasures, of a jumble of histories. The Bath stone emanates cold, and the paving underneath their feet is uneven. 

Dawn draws closer to him, her chatter stilled, her rosemary held to her nose.

At the end of the row a large cat sits motionless in front of a shop door. When they get closer, the cat turns and looks at them. Red eyes, but no, it can’t be –

The name of the shop is the Note.

When he sees it, he remembers. Yes, it had a different name once upon a time, but it was a music store then as it is now. He’d browsed here a dozen times but not bought anything. He hadn’t taken up his guitar again until Sunnydale. He hadn’t gone electric until he went to Dallas.

On the glass door is a large sign. "The Music of Life and Death," it says, and underneath it is the now familiar printed image of a small figure, doll or human, with a thin tracery of threads dangling from wrists and ankles. Music comes from inside, but he can’t make out its melody, and the printed figure is frozen. 

The red-eyed cat brushes against the glass once before leaping around the corner, disappearing behind stone.

Giles can see behind the door now. Still crammed with instruments, especially guitars, its interior seems darker than in its earlier incarnation. It feels wrong somehow. A counter runs the length of the shop, and on it leans a woman with untidy braids, her rose-coloured cape falling across the display case. She seems to be reading something.

He pulls Dawn back a few steps. Quietly, urgently, as he reaches for his worry-stone: "I need you to stay outside, Dawn, while I go in and speak to Rosamund Hills."

"That’s the...that’s her?" She tries to peer around him. "But I’m supposed to be learning interview techniques from you, watching you up close."

"No, Dawn." When she looks at him, such a serious Summers face, he makes himself say more. "I’m not... easy about this. The signs aren’t comforting, and I would be much happier if I knew you were out here – " don’t say ‘safe,’ he thinks, that’s always a sodding loser’s game – "ready to contact the others if I get into trouble."

"Yeah, but my phone’s dead –"

"Regardless. If I feel more comfortable once I’m in there, I’ll signal you to join me. But it’s only sensible to take these precautions."

Although Dawn protests a bit more for form’s sake, this last concession is enough for her. She stations herself across the way, half-hidden, and he wraps one hand around his talisman and crosses to the door.

Two bells ring when he goes inside the shop, and the music Rosamund Hills is listening to fades. The sounds somehow travel to his marked leg – pain radiates from the bandaged wound so far and hard that he has to catch a stack of amplifiers to keep himself steady, and the worry-stone slides around in his grip.

Rosamund Hills lifts her head. She’s a pale woman, with a bruise high on her cheek, her hands trapped in...it’s not a cape, he sees now, but a shawl. Even when she smiles, the sense of...absence... is strong. "Hello, how may I – _hello_! I know you, don’t I?"

He says, "We’ve met, I think? I used to live here. In Bath, I mean."

"No, I don’t think that’s it. No." She pulls at the shawl jerkily. There’s something hidden underneath; she clutches at a talisman just as he does, he thinks. "What are you looking for?"

He breathes in, opens up. He doesn’t see anything – the cloud and cold outside has migrated, is a miasma here – but he tastes earth on his tongue. As easily as he can, he says, "Ah, I was looking for some guitar strings. Heavy? Thirteen-gauge, perhaps?"

Her eyes sharpen. She is more present, she is less. "Oh, right. For a Fender?"

"Yes," he says. 

Hills moves around the counter, her hands working in her shawl. The lightness of the woven material darkens, rose turning to crimson. "Like the late Stevie Ray Vaughan favoured."

"Very like, yes. But not exactly."

"No, not exactly." Smiling, she nods at a case on the floor, then comes a step closer. He aches at the approach, his legs heavy, his mouth filling with dirt. "There are the strings you want."

He manages to say, "Would you get them for me?"

"No," she says, and it comes out as a cat-sound. "Because you’re not one of us, Watcher, even though you bear the mark of Wandering Jack."

When she leaps at him, he collects himself – he blocks her approach, catches her wrist to hold her off. The red of his ribbon shines clear, strong, against her own woven shield. But she’s much stronger than she looks, almost like a Slayer, and he’s pushed back a step.

She brings out the doll in her other hand, whips it across his face. The guitar-string arms bite into his cheek. Christ, it hurts as much as his leg.

But he catches her other wrist. "No, Rosamund, come back to yourself–"

"Wandering Jack wants you to dance," she hisses, and she pushes him back with that unnatural strength one more time. He hits the wall.

The wall opens.

As he topples backward into darkness, she lets go. There’s nothing to keep him aboveground, he thinks as he falls, but he’s still holding his talisman, the red ribbon still encircles his wrist. He feels a fluttering like kisses, like protection. Like wings.

He’s still falling, but it’s slow now, thick through black mud. He thinks of Dawn waiting and Buffy then and now. He thinks of Jenny, he thinks of his dearest Anya, he thinks of old patterns he’s tried to break. O, you must wear your rue with a difference.

_I’m fine. Everything’s fine. Don’t worry about me._


	5. Chapter 5

As time slows further, Giles reaches and finds a place to hold on.

Hand catches a railing. A turn in the air, a wrench in his back; hand tightens, weight on his shoulder and wrist. Almost there – 

And then he lands on his feet. The rocky surface jolts him so hard that his ankle cracks, he goes to his knees. “Fucking hell,” he whispers.

Light comes from above, and he pushes away the new and uninteresting pain in order to look up and around. He’s in... not quite a cellar, more like a corridor, with an unfinished staircase of some strange material and missing its last risers. The space was long ago dug out of the hill, he thinks. It smells like corrupted earth.

With an odd cat-growl, Rosamund Hills leaps down the steps and is upon him. He lashes out, his fist catching her on the cheek, and she scrambles back. 

But when he jumps up over the missing pieces of the staircase, three steps gone, his hurt ankle betrays him. He falls again, this time on his back, heavy. The air goes out of his lungs. Fucking hell, he thinks. He doesn’t have the breath to whisper.

Hills begins to chant something he can’t distinguish, bad rhythm, bad air, God he’s got to breathe. Then she unravels part of her crimson shawl. After biting off the yarn with sharp, sharp teeth, she leans down and catches his wrists, loops the yarn around, chanting all the while.

He feels dark magic locking his wrists together. What he also feels, however, and what she clearly doesn’t, is the pulse underneath from his commitment band and the red ribbon Dawn tied. Magic can be worked against magic, he thinks – but not now. Not until he can breathe.

“Up you go,” Hills says, and she push-pulls him to his feet. He bites his lip when his weight comes down on the hurt ankle, but he steadies himself. She says, in a voice from far away, “Wandering Jack’s going to want to dance with _you_. He told me you were coming.”

Then she shoves him further into the dark, and he hits an unseen wall, and his nebulous thoughts of smashing the stupid cow over her head and of crawling out of here dissolve into a wave of pain.

She’s upon him again, pushing him, and he stumbles into an ill-lit space cut out of stone. It reeks in here of blood and piss and bad magic, and he makes himself focus through his off-center glasses at the surroundings.

In one corner lies a body – dead, dead for a while, and battered before death. Giles thinks it was a man. In the other corner huddles a woman, her hands and feet tied with Hills’ yarn. She opens her mouth but makes no sound, and after a moment of silent crying shuts it again.

He can’t reach his worry-talisman at the moment – it slipped back into his pocket, he’ll try later – but despite that lack of magic, he strongly suspects he’s found Dunnitt Smith and Genevieve Lee after all. 

One more shove, and he’s against a wall again, the impact hard enough that his glasses fall off, his ankle cracks again. _Christ._

Hills steps on the glasses as she comes forward, then kneels. Fingers nibble-crawl under his jeans leg, nails scratching into skin, and his pain escapes in a harsh breath. So, breathing again. As his love might say, there’s a plus.

“You’re not going anywhere, Watcher,” Hills says, “no need for additional measures. I’m not feeling any magic here.” She stands again, a still point between corpse and shivering mute woman and himself. Her eyes have an animal-gleam. “Supper in a few hours. Wandering Jack later, after the twelfth strike of the clock. Oh, it’s going to be a good night.”

As she disappears down the corridor into the black, even his uncorrected vision can tell that she moves like a marionette.   
........................................................................

Anya’s morning newspaper is draped over her work keyboard. Even several hours after its delivery and a good morning of sales, she can’t stop looking at it, can’t stop shaking.

The story, buried so deep in the Local section that she almost missed it, reads, _“Two people reported missing from South Dallas nightclub.”_ A couple of biker-types – not that the reporter calls them that, but Anya’s learned to decode journalism – disappeared from the Bloodknot the night she and Rupert investigated, and their drunk buddies have just got around to mentioning their absence to the authorities. Thrall: she’d bet her December profits on it.

Sixteen ugly hours, the Blind One said a few hours ago. She wants a closer accounting of the anguish-to-hours-spent ratio. She wants to be able to talk to Rupert, but Dawn’s phone is still dead, and she’s left several less-than-calm voicemails already.

She kicks off her shoes, pulls her feet up into her work chair and sits on them so she doesn’t run screaming into the day, and then collects her notepad and a pencil. Maybe other work can be done, especially to find these poor ensorcelled people.

_Options_ , she writes. _Call Buffy for Slayer help._ Her pencil tapping against her teeth, she considers this. There are a couple of Slayers relatively nearby – one in San Antonio, as she recalls. But they wouldn’t be able to get here for several hours, maybe not until it’s time to meet with Johnny Ames. Also, there’s the basic Slayer approach to problem-solving: kill, kill. What if killing Johnny Ames doesn’t work? What if the real problem’s something else?

She crosses this one out, despite her desperation to call Buffy anyway and tell her to go find Rupert and give him a damn cell phone that’s charged and works in England, which she’d _told_ him he’d need, hadn’t she. Yes. Never mind.

_Check the evil storefront near Vida’s myself._ This isn’t something that appeals to her or that she finds very practical – her magic as a rule works much better when she casts with Rupert or as part of a circle, although the idea of filling Johnny Ames’ nasty lair with bunnies is pleasant, and they’ve still got that spell-book from the Magic Box. She writes this down; she’ll check with the Blind One.

_Call Miss Vida Lee and Miss Vida Ann_ myself. That’s more like it, she thinks – they’re so close to the evil storefront, and anybody who casually has that kind of power as a veil in their storeroom probably has some other mighty magic on tap. But then, wouldn’t they have used it already if they could have? She’ll check this with the Blind One too.

She wants Rupert so badly, she wants to talk to him, she has this horrible, horrible feeling– 

A strange noise from the back room, a scratch-thud at the same time, makes her jump. “Who’s there?” she calls.

“Just me, Anya,” Suzanne says. “I’m early for my shift, I got bored, except look what I found!” She appears in the doorway between storeroom and shop, and she’s holding a large and very purry grey cat.

Cat. Two cats bolting in front of her this morning – “Suzanne, where did you get that, and why did you bring it in here?”

“He was chasing off that old ugly feral thing that lives in the alley. Told Tomcat to get the heck out of our dumpster, didn’t you?” This last bit is cooed to the cat, who nuzzles her nose condescendingly. 

“Was he eating trash too? Because his breath might not be fresh,” Anya says automatically, but she’s considering hard. She’d thought both cats were bad, but maybe not. Maybe there’s larger protection out there. _Somewheres._ “Suzanne, could I see his eyes?”

When the cat turns his own head as if he understands her, his eyes are huge, and gold, and wise. She thinks with a little shock that if the Blind One had eyes, this would be what they looked like.

Bell on the front door rings, and she struggles to put her feet down – until she sees who it is and what he’s carrying. “Lindsey, hi. So you saw the newspaper story?”

“Yes, and so did everybody across the street,” he says, before he looks a second time at the cat. “What the hell are you doing with that, Suze?”

“He’s a hero, a protector of the shop,” she coos again, before the cat does a peculiar move and leaps out of her hands. 

Two bounds, and the cat is weaving himself around Lindsey’s ankles, rrr-ing like a motor. “Hey there, buddy,” Lindsey says, then looks at Anya. “Blind One says we’re to be in his office at six-thirty. We’ll be singing, I think.”

“Okay. Fine.” Anya wraps her arms more tightly around herself. “But what about the missing people, or victims?”

“Blind One says we’ll take care of it all this evening.” Lindsey bends down to pet the cat, who arches up to meet him, and mutters something about it being easier when there was a goddamn champion around. But maybe she can’t hear him correctly. 

The bell rings again, and it’s two of her favourite customers. “Hello, Betty, hello, Margery!” she says, and she slips herself back into her shop-manager self and her shoes.

But she looks back at the newspaper all the same, and wishes fervently for Rupert.  
...........................................................

Giles stretches his aching back, then resettles himself on the uneven rock flooring, paying special attention to his swelling ankle. “So, when do we get that promised supper, Genevieve?” he says to the still silent woman. His throat rasps on the words.

It’s been hours down here in this fetid place. He’s confident that Dawn didn’t follow him into the shop, or she’d be down here too – he’s mostly confident of that, he corrects himself. That’s a small grace in an afternoon of horrors. That, and his ability to see fairly well without his glasses.

He’s been talking to Genevieve off and on, trying to elicit information or even a reaction. She looks over at him now and then, but most of the time she stares at the small battery-operated light hung above her head. Her mouth opens and closes repeatedly, without sound, possibly without volition. She’s retreating inside herself, perhaps fighting whatever spells Rosamund Hills has laid on her.

She has to move sometime, however, even if it’s a crab-like slew over the rocks – there’s a chamber-pot in the last corner, over in the dark. It stinks almost as much as the corpse of Dunnitt Smith. Next to the corpse is the gleam of another container, silver edging gold. Giles wonders if it’s supposed to be for burial or capture.

“And I wonder who Wandering Jack is,” he says aloud. “You’d think I’d have read about him, it, at some point in my years of research. He could be a demon, he could be a dimension-traveller, he could be...anyone. From anywhere.” He pauses. “Or somewheres.”

Genevieve scrabbles something on the rock beside her.

“Is that meant for me? Did I, er, guess right?” 

Another scrabble, then a look away.

He rubs his nose with his bound hands – his bands underneath Hills’ yarn are beginning to hum, which makes him speculate about guesses and truth and the return of what magic he could muster. But he also smells, very faintly, the trace of rosemary from Dawn’s gift. Is it real or memory, he wonders. Memory....

“Genevieve, if you don’t mind, I’d like to come over there and see what you’re writing.” When she huddles back inside herself, he adds casually, “And I’ll tell you about my darling. Have I talked about my partner Anya yet?”

She turns her head, lays it on her bent knees. Her mouth opens and closes, as if to say ‘Go on.’

He struggles to stand – the first touch of his full weight on that foot is a pain so sharp he has to lean against the wall and close his eyes, breathe himself through it. But he manages, and as he begins to limp the short distance between here and there, he says in a story-telling voice, “I used to live here in Bath, don’t know how you and I missed each other. Several years ago, however, what with duty and apocalypse, I moved to America, and there I met a lovely, er, not _young_ exactly, woman. Old soul, you might say. She’s bright and funny and brutally honest, and thinks she knows better than I do in almost all areas of life. Which, sadly, is often true. She says this is because I’m a man, it’s only to be expected.” 

There’s a muffled little laugh from Genevieve, an instant of relaxation.

Dear God, he hurts, every movement like a twist of a rope on burned skin. But speaking of Anya makes it bearable. He keeps going. “We moved apart for a time, and then, when I was at my lowest point, I found her again. She’s so...well, beautiful, yes, but she’s focussed. See a project, see it through.” He swallows hard, his mouth gone dry. “The day she made me her life-project was one of the best days of my life, and I’ve been thankful for it every hour since. Anya is magic.” When he gets to Genevieve’s side, he uses the wall to slide down. He hits bottom with a bitten-off exclamation of pain, then turns to smile at her. “She’s also extremely irritating. She told me to bring a bloody functioning mobile, and when we get out of here, I expect a scold for not heeding her advice.”

Genevieve’s eyes fill with tears – he catches a glimpse just before she buries her face in her knees.

“Oh, now, none of that,” he says gently. “Let’s keep going, shall we?” And because his words have brought home so near to him, because he can be there and here at the same time, he begins to sing softly. _“‘Let it shine on me, let it shine on me....’”_

Still crying without sound, she turns to look at him again. There’s something stirring in her eyes, he believes – and he lifts his hands, and says, “‘There’s rosemary for remembrance.’”

She breathes in. Surely the herb is gone by now, he thinks, but she’s a herbalist. She can catch her own essence from nothingness.

When her eyes widen, he sees that she can indeed. The spell she’s under shivers, then falls to pieces around them, invisible but real.

Footsteps sound from the broken stairs, down the dark corridor. “That’s supper,” he says quietly, “And we’ll pretend not to remember. But we will, and we’ll move to our next step in getting out.”

She moistens dry lips, swallows hard. She smiles. “A...project.”

And that’s what almost breaks him, the echo of his memory about Anya. Echo means distance, he thinks, he longs to be _there_ with her. But he smiles in return, and edges through shattering pain further away from Genevieve, so that when Rosamund Hills comes in with water and nuts and bread, she seems not to notice anything’s different.

Under the yarn knots, however, his true connections begin to hum again, more strongly.  
..................................................

Anya’s been anxious all afternoon. She almost called England three times, she buzzed around the shop until she drove herself crazy, and then she went upstairs and paced around her and Rupert’s home, looking at random through his grimoires and histories of magic, occasionally putting post-it notes where he needs to correct an author’s stupidity.

She wasted fifteen minutes looking up flights to London, longing to surprise him, knowing she can’t. There are goods to sell, there is sorcery to break, there is duty on both sides.

Now it’s time at last. The air still is hot and tarry when she opens the door, and turns to wave at Suzanne who’ll close for her. “Be safe, use the proper wards after dark!” she says, steps outside– 

And the grey cat who’s made himself at home slips through the space between door and frame, brushing her ankles as he goes. “Now, cat,“ she says, for he hasn’t told her his name yet, “you don’t want to run out that way.”

The street is busy with the usual after-work traffic. But the cat streaks across the road safely between the cars, and then it cat-screams and leaps on another animal which had been sitting by the front door of Blind Willie’s – that’s the feral cat that lives in the alley, she thinks. The animals become a battling mass of grey and gold, and is that a flash of red eye from the other one?

Anya hurries across the street to see, but the shop cat claws the red-eyed creepy one, and then they’re both darting off through the pedestrians, yowling loud as they can. She sees that the short, intense tussle has left a spattering of blood on the sidewalk, too. Repressing a shiver, she skirts around the mess and goes into Blind Willie’s.

The club’s just opening for the night. Shanice waves from over at the DJ’s booth, and Esteban at the bar waves too. Anya would like to stop and talk, and possibly slam down a shot or two of bourbon before freaking out, but no time. She says loudly, “Hi, Shanice, stay safe,” and then says more quietly to Esteban, “I’m supposed to go see the Blind One.”

“He’s expecting you, _chica_. Lindsey’s already up there,” he says, and he opens the hidden door for her.

It’s cold in the staircase as it was this morning, and her footsteps sound odd to her, like they belong to someone else. She looks down, almost expecting to see rock or bone instead of ordinary risers. For a moment her vision dims, and some of the steps seem to be missing – but that’s crazy, it’s all here, and she goes on up. 

Terrence, fierce and solemn, stands at the office door. Without speaking he puts his hand on her shoulder – there’s a spark there on her skin, goodness lingering like a touch of Rupert – and ushers her into the shuttered, candle-lit room of the Blind One. The room hasn’t changed from this morning, and the Cord of Life still gleams from its place in the circle. 

“Prompt as always, Anya,” the Blind One says, and he reaches out to her. When she goes to him and touches his ring, his clawed hand turns gently on hers and lifts her back up. He’s smiling, and his cheer’s really scary. “Sing a little something for me, please. Let me hear how your voice is this evening.”

“Sing? Okay. Um....” For some reason she can’t think of anything at first, mind gone blank, and then she remembers Rupert’s Blind Willie song, the very first one he sang when he first met the Blind One. She takes a deep breath. _“‘Nobody’s fault but mine, nobody’s fault but mine.’”_

Lindsey’s standing by the window, she almost didn’t see him at first in the shadows. At her singing he flattens his hands against the wall and bows his head.

“Easy, easy,” the Blind One says to him, and then to Anya, “My dear child. All shall be well.”

“But didn’t you say that we were going to have some ugly hours? Are those over?” she says.

“No. The worst is coming.” Which she does not find comforting in the least. But he’s already gesturing a command. “I need you and Lindsey in the circle, please.”

Now that she looks at it – “Hey, is that bigger than it was this morning?”

“Yes. We need more to contain somewheres,” the Blind One says. Then, sharply, “Lindsey, have you made up your mind yet?”

When Lindsey turns around, Anya catches her breath. Oh God, he looks horrible, as if the hours between his afternoon visit to the shop and now have been tortured ones. He’s angry about something, she doesn’t know what, but she can _feel_ it. “What would you do if I said No, Blind One?” he says.

The Blind One lifts his cane, and there comes a sound of high wind, cold and lonely. The tip of the cane touches one of the candle flames, and the fire leaps to the ceiling and then retreats. “Nothing,” he says. “Nothing, Lindsey McDonald. It is yours to choose.”

“I hate that free-will shit,” Lindsey mutters, but he comes over to Anya and takes her hand.

“Is this the evil one?” she says, even as she squeezes his fingers. That makes him laugh, although she didn’t mean it to be funny, and together they step over the low wall of fire and into the circle. She can feel something strong emanating from the Cord of Life in its eternity-sign, and the guitars on the wall hum. “So, sir, what do we do now?”

“Keep holding on to each other, please, but stand on either side of our sign.” The Blind One taps his cane on the wooden floor , and the guitars sing louder.

As if obeying a secret signal, Terrence leaves. She and Lindsey find their places, and the Blind One walks with his odd lightness around them. The candle-fire seems to brighten as he passes.

She thinks of Rupert, there not here, and makes a good wish.

Thud. Thud. Thud. Steps on the staircase. The guitars stop singing.

Thud. Thud. The door seems to disappear, and Johnny Ames swaggers into view in the darkened rectangle left by its absence. He has one hand in his pocket, visible because of the drape of that unattractive poncho. In his other hand dangles the doll Rupert had seen. Strings from its strings reach the floor, and hisses come from the wood they touch. “Hey, Blind One,” he says. “Got a message for you.”

“I’m sure you do,” the Blind One says mildly. “Come in, and bring your master with you.”

That’s when Anya sees a huge, round shadow with long spider-arms rise up behind Johnny Ames.


	6. Chapter 6

The battery-powered light is fading, and odd spider-shadows crawl down the wall and across the floor, thrown by nothing. 

Fighting exhaustion and the throbs of pain from ankle and marked shin and bruised face, Giles squints down at his watch. One o’clock... what had Rosamund Hills said about this Wandering Jack? He’d be here after midnight. 

The spider-shadows extend further, skittering on stone – Giles almost expects them to reach off the wall and scoop up the dark. Wait, he thinks with a sudden shock, those aren’t spider legs. Those are the dangling arms of Johnny Ames’ doll, of Rosamund Hills’ doll. 

Thud. Thud. Thud. Someone’s coming down the stairs. 

“Giles,” Genevieve whispers.

“Yes. We’re ready.” He looks down at the yarn around his hands. It will pass a cursory inspection if necessary, he thinks, although his hours of effort have loosened the bonds sufficiently. Inside one fist is his worry-talisman – he can do something with that, perhaps. 

Genevieve shifts uneasily. “Watch your bonds,” he says quietly. After he loosened his, he unpicked her knots. What had the Blind One said to him when he was seeking the Prokaryote stone? _You cannot loose another’s chains until your own are gone._

He tightens his hold on his talisman.

Thud. Thud. Down the corridor now. More than one person, he thinks. Fucking heavy steps.

He looks back at the light, and makes a good wish, as Anya and the Blind One have taught him. Then he waits.

The dark at the mouth of the hallway seems to deepen, and Rosamund Hills, wrapped in her blood-red shawl, walks into their stone cell. She says happily, “Stroke of one. And Wandering Jack is here for you.”

Behind her looms shadow, huge and round, and long spider-limbs reach from out of the black, crawling over its small, flickering simulacrum. Legs upon legs, bond over bond –

In the corner, Dunnitt Smith’s dead body jerks, arms and legs moving as if pulled by strings.

A deep, amused voice in the dark – Christ, it sounds like a twisted echo of the Blind One – says, “Ah, the new meat I chose and marked in the Bloodknot.” 

And the corpse begins to sing. 

The song is “Voodoo Child, Slight Return.” Giles isn’t at all surprised.  
................................................................

The guitars on the Blind One’s walls make a horrible discordant noise, the flames around Anya and Lindsey snap like little animals’ teeth, and oh, this meat and marking reference doesn’t make her happy. 

“New meat from the Bloodknot?” The Blind One repeats the words spoken by Johnny Ames’ shadow, but he changes the inflection, makes it better. His cane lightly taps against the floor as he moves closer to the circle. “Are you talking about that old trick of yours, Jack, stealing what’s not yours? Or–“ and the cane snaps up to pass over the circle, over Lindsey, over her – “Are you talking to me at all?”

When Johnny Ames opens his mouth to speak, the spider-arm becomes solid, becomes real, and covers his mouth. The doll in his hand falls to the floor, its arms almost long enough to touch the fire. Smoke rises, even without touch. The guitars twang again, and it’s that damn Stevie Ray song but played wrong, so wrong. 

When the Blind One raises his cane again, though, the instruments quiet into harmony.

The shadow says, “Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. Maybe, you blind bastard, I’m talking to one of your servants, stolen away from you, hidden in the deep.” Anya clutches Lindsey’s hand – the root of her unease today is exposed to the light now, oh God, something’s happened to Rupert. And the shadow says, “‘Cause you know what our wise fathers and mothers taught us....”

“Everybody’s got to be somewheres,” the Blind One finishes. “The problem is, Jack, you don’t follow the logic of that to the end of the line. You never have.”  
.....................................................................

The song from the corpse fades, but there’s other music in the cave, healing music from somewhere else. From home, Giles thinks.

It gives him the strength to say, “Everybody’s got to be somewheres. May I ask where we are? Before you, er, do whatever you plan to do. ‘Dance,’ is that what Rosamund said?” 

From the dark comes, “Yes, brother, dance. That’s the fucking _logic_ of it. Dance and die.” 

The shadow in the cave brushes past Hills so fast that she stumbles into the side of the wall, her totem dropping onto stone as she hits it, and a shadow-arm punches into the fading light and becomes real. The cold dark edge of it curls around Giles’ waist and lifts him to his feet. 

He bites back the pain when his ankle takes his weight, he makes himself smile. “A problem, then. I don’t dance, except with my partner.”

The shadow hisses. “Yes, I know. And I know the guilt at the heart.” 

Giles thinks of Anya, he thinks of his lies. _I’m fine. Everything’s fine. Don’t worry about me._

He thinks of her, and lets the guilt go, and smiles at the shadow.  
...................................................

When the shadow curls closer to the fire and hisses about guilt, he’s talking to her. Anya knows he is, just as she knows Rupert’s in horrible trouble.

Oh God, she told Rupert to go. She could have kept him here, but she let him go, and anything that happens to him is her fault. Vengeance never strikes the right person, she thinks.

But she stays quiet and still, listening from her place in the circle. She’s failed Rupert so badly, but she won’t screw up the job.

“Guilt is not yours to assign, Jack, it never was,” the Blind One says, and his voice is stronger, deeper. It fills the room, no, it pushes against the walls and out, it ripples like the robe he’s not wearing but she knows now he has. “You’ve crossed my threshold at my invitation, but you hold no power here.”

“Don’t I, fat one?” The huge shadow expands over the circle now, growing as the Blind One’s voice grows. It’s the Bloodknot all over again, it’s the real behind the puppet – “What do you think, Lindsey, my dead man?” 

............................................................................

Giles can’t quite hear what the shadow of Wandering Jack is saying. The words disappear into the walls, eaten by the earth, and the shadow is fading in and out, here and somewhere else. But what he does see is the corpse stirring more purposefully. Dead arms push on the stone, the body rolls over. 

The reanimated corpse is going to get up and sodding dance.

“What’s in your heart, dead man?” the shadow says now, clearly and distinctly.

Rosamund Hills is crying – she started when the shadow pronounced ‘guilt,’ a reaction keyed to a note – but she echoes, as if singing call-and-response, “What’s in your heart?”

Dunnitt Smith’s body opens its mouth, and Stevie Ray’s voice comes out in anguish, in a twisted form of the blues. It’s not song any more, it’s just pain. 

And the corpse is trying to stand.

Time, Giles thinks. With an effort he shakes off the yarn bonds, keeping one end of the loop between his fingers. He makes a circle with the red on the stone floor.

Genevieve, who’s been still and silent all this while, shakes off her leg bonds and manages to get to her feet. As they planned, she reaches up for the light – 

“No!” Hills screams, and she skitters across the floor like a spider, her shawl trailing after her. 

..............................................................................

Johnny Ames and the shadow called Jack say it together one more time, puppet-hand reaching over the flames, darkness reaching over the flames: “What’s in your heart, dead man?”

“I’m not dead,” Lindsey says. Anya holds onto him, bringing over her other hand to cover his wrist. The red scar-line burns, but that’s just part of the deal, she thinks. She holds tighter.

“Aren’t you, Lindsey? You sure look damned and dead to me!” the shadow says, and he’s laughing. “You think that because you ran from that contract, it’s void now? You think this fat, blind prisoner gonna set you free? Brother, brother, you’re smarter than that. Come on out. Come back where you belong.”

Anya hears Lindsey swallow. He’s shaking. “Don’t listen,” she says.

“No, my dear, he must listen and choose. Choose to stay, Lindsey, or choose to go.” The Blind One is right behind them, a protection against their back, and the candlefire leaps. With a warm, kind chuckle: “You know I believe in that free-will shit.”

Johnny Ames is twitching now – the fire’s almost to him, it’s got to hurt, but the shadow’s pulling his strings, lighting his eyes red. “You’re a voodoo child, man. Come on over and dance.” 

“It’s just the beginning,” the shadow says, his chuckle a distorted version of the Blind One’s. “You’ve tasted what we can give you, there in Los Angeles. Come dance, come taste.”

Come be _tasted_ , that’s what Anya thinks.   
..........................................................

Giles manages to knock Hills away from Genevieve – oh God, it hurts to touch the shadow’s servant, for a moment he feels like he’s crumbling from the inside.

“Come dance, come taste,” Wandering Jack says, as clear as the stone is dark, and Hills licks her lips, the corpse licks its lips, they stumble forward. “It’s a goddamn feast, brother. Watcher, grower, _magic_ going down!”

But Genevieve leaps for the light and brings it down, lays it on the red circle. The beam creates a second pale circle, lapping out to touch the dark – 

And she grabs Giles’ arm and helps him over the string without disturbing it. 

Scream from the corpse, scream from Hills, hiss from the shadow. Any music there might have been in this place has died. The three press in, almost in, almost in. Giles can smell corrupted earth, as if a shovel has turned over something foul, set something free.

With one hand on Anya’s ribbon, he balances himself, and then crushes the plastic light with his bad leg. He whispers a call for fire.

Almost before he can get his foot back inside, the yarn bursts into flame. Runs the circle, leaps into gold.

Now they can finish.  
............................................................................

Lindsey’s trembling so hard that the fire is wavering like the shadow. It’s going strange colours, Anya thinks, blood-red battling with the gold, with the blue. 

“Choose,” the Blind One says.

“Choose, dead man,” the shadow says.

And Anya remembers D’Hoffryn saying, _Is this your wish?_ For a while she’d thought that one moment was all she needed to get better, but really, and very unfairly, the choice keeps coming back. She understands where Lindsey is, trapped in somewheres, badness behind and badness all around. She tightens her hold on him so hard that she can feel the beat of his blood. 

She makes a good wish for him, the best wish she can.

Johnny Ames’ doll leaps up, like it’s been pulled by something much bigger than she can see, and the fire leaps too. With a roar the flame catches the doll and consumes it in a gold-and-blue flash.

Lindsey rolls his shoulders, sighs. “Well, if I have to, guess I will.” And he starts singing Rupert’s song. _“‘Let it shine on me, let it shine on me....”_

Anya starts singing too, although her throat feels dry and sore. The guitars on the wall chime in, and it’s happy, it’s a good choice.

“Well done. Now, walk the Cord you brought me,” the Blind One says, and together she and Lindsey start to walk the eternity-loop, still singing. It’s kind of awkward, she thinks, but anyway.... it’s their job. Let the bad stuff go for the moment.

The Cord vibrates like it’s singing too, which Anya finds kind of weird and yet somehow expected.

..................................................... 

The louder they sing, the further back the shadow of Wandering Jack falls, the more confused Hills is, the shakier the reanimated body becomes.

_“‘Let it shine on, oh let it shine on, let the light from the lighthouse shine on me....”_ Giles sings, and Genevieve sings the notes if not the words, and the fire rises. The bands on his wrists hum in time to music made here and at home. He can hear Anya as clearly as if she stands within the circle of his arms.

Time, he thinks, and he drops his talisman into the fire.

The doll-figure that Hills had been carrying bursts into flame, gold-and-blue swallowing it up in one gulp.

Hills cries out “No!” and then drops her shawl on the stone. She’s much smaller without it, rather ordinary. “No, no!” The second negative she speaks to the shadow.

The container in the corner flashes gold, then explodes, shards going everywhere. The body of Dunnitt Smith drops. The strings are cut.

Wandering Jack says, “Well, no dance tonight. But I’ll still be out in the somewheres, brother, and I’ll be back,” and the shadow disappears.

...............................................................

Anya and Lindsey barely make it twice around the loop before the shadow called Jack makes his over-the-top pronouncement about somewheres and disappears– all those Big Evil guys are drama-queens, she thinks, it must be in their contracts. But that does leave Johnny Ames, small and shivering in front of the door.

“Stop, my children,” the Blind One says, and the guitars fall silent, and she and Lindsey let go of each other. 

Johnny Ames doesn’t look quite so scary now, sitting on his butt and pushing himself backward with his feet, scratch scratch scratch on the polished wood. He’s watching the Blind One like the boss is going to eat him or something– 

And Terrence comes through the door and puts his hands on Ames’s shoulders, which makes the one-time bokor scream like a small and easily frightened child. Terrence’s mouth twists up in a smile. “What would you like me to do with him, boss?”

“Don’t turn me over to him!” Ames screams. “He wants to kill me, I didn’t mean to fuck it up–”

“Oh, what a fuss,” the Blind One says dismissively. “There are those who might need rescue from your master’s dark magic, Johnny Ames, and I’ll take care of them before I take care of you.”

“When Jack goes, the thrall goes, the spirits are okay,” Ames says, breathing too fast like a cornered animal. “They’ll be fine once they’re let out.”

Anya says, “Okay, fine. Does that work everywhere? Because, Great One, the shadow-guy said something about Rupert being trapped, and I haven’t heard from him for hours–“

“He’ll be safe now, dear child, harmony’s been restored. But I do know how worried you’ve been. Come to me.” The Blind One puts out the candles with a snap of his clawed fingers, then extends a hand to her. She takes it and steps out of the circle, then pulls Lindsey out too. 

McDonald looks a bit like he did before the shadow, haggard and worn, but he’s smiling now. It’s a real smile, the kind she doesn’t see on his face very often. “So, boss, how’d we do?”

The Blind One touches Lindsey’s forehead on the deepest furrow. “You did well. You’ve made up your mind indeed, and at the right time.”

“Yeah. Finally.” Lindsey collapses in a shaking heap of lawyer-shirt and cowboy boots, and buries his head in his hands. Muffled: “It’s fucking scary to choose.”

“Yes, it is. People don’t know how scary,” Anya says in fellow-feeling. Then, pointedly, “Sir, about Rupert–“

“Hush, Anya. I have something very important to say.”

She wants to scream like Ames did, but in impatience not fear. Okay, maybe a bit of fear – she’s fairly sure that this shadow-Jack isn’t really gone for long – and guilt, and longing for her partner, but also impatience. Still, she folds her hands together and presses them in front of her mouth to keep herself quiet, and then nods emphatically.

The Blind One laughs, breaks the bond of her hands, and spins her around like a dancer in a musical (without the use of enspelled amulet, of course). “What I want to say, dear child, is that it is long past time my manager of Magic Places had a vacation. Although Halloween is almost here, I believe we can spare you for a week.“

“I’ll help in the store. So will Ruth,” Terrence says, and Lindsey mumbles something.

“There, you see? Already fully staffed. Although our Lindsey might rethink his offer when he gets _his_ surprise.” When the Blind One pulls her back in, he grins at her. “Perhaps you might like to go to England and fetch our brave Rupert home.”

“Yes. Yes yes yes!” She’s already skirting Ames and Terrence on her dance to the door, but she pauses before the threshold. Love and duty have warring claims: “Of course we do have a pre-holiday sale starting Monday....”

“Your job at the moment is to collect my Watcher,” the Blind One says firmly. “Go as soon as you can. Tomorrow.”

Worried, thrilled, already planning, she speeds down the staircase toward the music from Blind Willie’s and the noise of people having a good time, laughing, drinking, and enjoying the dance in a non-creepy way. Shanice is playing the good blues, the kind that heals.

When Anya gets to the bottom of the stairs, the hidden door swings open, and a dark, bulky figure looms in the frame. A vaguely familiar dark figure, though – “Hey! Hey, are you Angel?”

“Yes,” he says, monosyllabically. He doesn’t recognize her, she thinks. “Is this the way to see the Blind One?”

“Of course.” She scrutinizes his face. He might very well be the surprise for Lindsey to which the Blind One referred, but a person can never be too careful: “Are you evil again?”

“Why does everyone always ask me that,” he mutters. With a nod he shoulders past her on his way upstairs.

She catches the door before it closes, and then she spins out into the light of the bar. Across her shoulder she feels fluttering, like kisses, like protection.

......................................................

“I don’t think I can walk any faster,” Giles says through clenched teeth. “You go ahead.”

Genevieve hasn’t waited for his permission. It’s dark in the corridor, as they broke the only light when they were casting against Wandering Jack. Still, he can see a faint glimmer ahead, a shape moving swiftly in the black. She’ll find the staircase without his help, he thinks, and he takes a moment to lean against the cold, uneven rock, get the weight off his ankle. With one finger he finds his Anya-ribbon and teases its edges in an attempt to steady himself.

Now that the spell’s done, he’s feeling battered, and sore, and ancient, and frankly a little hurt that no one’s come to the rescue – 

_“Here!”_ A familiar, welcome shriek descends into the darkness, barely quieted at all by the objects and distance between then. “This is the hidden door, Buffy! If you had brought the right magics from home like I asked you–“

“Just save it, Dawn.” The equally familiar female voice makes him smile.

There’s a pop when wood releases from wood, and good cool air and light streams from above. Genevieve is at the foot of the broken staircase, he sees, but she can’t seem to speak. Well, the Summers women can be a bit overwhelming on first meeting, and it’s been a bloody awful time.... He calls, “Dawn? Buffy?” 

“Giles!” That’s from both Summers women, although Buffy adds characteristically, “Do we need to kill anything?”

“Er, no. We do have Rosamund Hills tied up back there, and we found a body of another victim. But no Slaying’s necessary at the moment.”

The broken staircase poses no problems for them, it seems. They’re both down in an instant, armed with torches and backpacks, and Spike’s right on their heels. The tosser stops when he sees Giles, in fact, and raises an eyebrow. “You look like hell, Rupes.”

“Thank you, Spike. Apparently you’ve not lost your talent for stating the obvious.” Giles manages to straighten up, with just a token wince or two, or three. But he smiles at them all.

Dawn and Buffy prop him up on either side, Buffy exclaiming over the “puffy badness” of his ankle, Dawn babbling about the slowness of the Slayer reinforcements from London and their arguments over strategy and the stupid failure of the Slayer team to bring the proper accessories for ward-breaking, and Spike offers a hand to Genevieve. The tricky missing steps are negotiated, and they all climb upward into the light.

Robson and a few of the new lot are hovering there, and Giles and Genevieve manage to give them the relevant information before the Watcher team takes over the hard work. He’d feel guilty about his relief in handing over the responsibility, except Christ, he hurts so very much.

As they finally emerge into the cold night, he closes his eyes, sways on his one good foot – it’s been a _fucking_ awful day. When he opens his eyes, Buffy’s right there to catch him. “Sorry, sorry. I wouldn’t have asked you to investigate if I’d known...” she says, in what sounds more like guilt than apology. He knows what that’s like from the inside.

He smiles at her again, despite his aches. “Not to worry. You called, and I’m here, and you can turn the rest of the job over to your Council.” Then he clears his throat. “But now, if I could perhaps get a ride to the nearest Casualty department? And, erm, a phone to call Anya?”

“You have to confess again, like you did earlier, don’t you!” Dawn says, laughing, holding on more tightly. 

“Well, yes. This time I’ll tell her straightaway I’m rather, er, worse for wear. But you know–“ his gaze touches all of them, then lifts to the black, star-touched sky – “Really, I’m fine. Just fine.”

.....................................................................

 

In the depths of Heathrow, Anya hefts her suitcase off the conveyor belt and onto the cold floor, then rolls it to a less tourist-polluted area nearby. She needs to check her information.

From her purse she pulls the sheet she printed off with her travel data and Dawn’s directions on getting to Rupert’s hotel. It’s been an easy enough trip, if not as easy as teleportation; she only got a couple of hours of sleep on the plane due to excitement and a screaming infant and too much free chocolate and in-flight entertainment provided by British Airways, but she arrived at 7:05 am as scheduled, check. She’s been through Immigration and gotten her bag, check. Next, she has to find the Heathrow Express train. It’s got lots of signage, Dawn says, the non-mystical kind Anya can read.

The wheels of her suitcase and the heels of her shoes make a merry sound as she walk-runs through the Customs point, the speed partly because she’s freezing, partly because of anticipation. Her mind is singing along: here in London, here for Rupert who needs love and nursing and safe passage back home, here in London.....

She passes that last duty-free shop with only a glance – duty-free’s a fool’s game, everyone knows that – and heads out into the terminal area, its walls of windows unshaded, cold, and grey. People on either side form a lane to walk: chauffeurs with names on white boards, company drivers with business names nicely printed, friends and family and others who use themselves as signs. 

She just glances at them, feels a moment of longing, and then hurries on. Faster she moves, faster she gets the train, faster she gets to him – 

“Anya. Darling.” The voice is quiet and a little raspy, but she can’t miss it.

He’s _here._

When a knot of tourists untangles, she sees him standing behind the terminal rope and smiling at her. God, he looks so tired, and banged up, he’s even leaning on a cane which helps the wrapped ankle that shows between trouser and shoe – “Rupert, honey!”

Wheels and heels clicking, she ducks under the rope. He reaches out with one arm, re-balances himself, and then pulls her to him, and she’s home, burrowing in.

“Honey,” she says again, muffled by his sweater, “Why are you here? You’re wounded, you should be resting.”

“Look up.” When she does, he gingerly leans down, and his mouth finds hers. Because of unsteadiness he doesn’t kiss as deeply as he usually does, but it’s just fine, he’s fine, and her tears rise up, barely dammed. Then time slows, ribboning around them as it always does when they’re concentrating on each other, and they just hold on. Noise and grey and cold fade away.

Another kiss, and then he says, “Don’t be absurd. Of course I came to fetch you.”

“No, stupid man, you’ve got that all backwards. I’m here to fetch _you._ ”

When he smiles at her, her heart twists, and she reaches up to touch his poor bruised and scraped face. Closing his eyes, he allows her to brush her fingers over the marks as gently as she can, then opens his eyes again when he’s had enough. 

“I’ve got some balm for those scrapes in my case,” she says. “Oh, and I brought your spare pair of glasses – do you want them now?” 

“Not at this moment, no. I’ll manage.” He kisses a wandering finger, then grips her shoulder. “Shall we? I managed to talk Robson out of a Council car and driver, and she’s waiting for us.” 

“But I’m all prepared for the train! I researched route and payment options, and got extra notes from Dawn.”

“Yes, well, we’ll take the Express when we leave. But my ankle....“

“Oh. Oh.” Before he can stop her, she crouches to look at it. Yes, it’s well-wrapped, but still swollen: “You should have this propped up. Rest, ice, compression, elevation. The instructions are very clear.”

“Yes, my love. When we get to the hotel, you can clarify what each of those means.”

“Don’t think I won’t. Also, when you’re ready, we definitely should have healing sex.” But she bounds to her feet, grabs the handle of her suitcase, puts her arm around his waist. “Let’s go, and I’ll tell you about my adventure, and Lindsey and Angel, and my speculations about who the Blind One is, and you’ll tell me about yours –“

“All right – wait, Lindsey and _Angel_?”

“Yep! The _brooding_ one of the vampire champions showed up, I heard the shouting and insults all the way across the street. Also, we now have a watch-cat of possibly magical origin. Suzanne’s taking him in for his shots tomorrow.” When he wobbles a little – her sweet man, she should have remembered he sometimes feels buffeted by too much information – she says, “I’ll tell you everything later, and more slowly.”

“Thank you.” He stops to catch his breath, then kisses her forehead. “Darling, I’ve missed you more than I can say.”

“Me too. Me too.” She gives him a proper kiss, then, “Stand still, Rupert.” Her hand goes up to test his ears – they’re cold. It’s cold in England, she’d figured that much. 

“Anya, why are you bloody fondling my ears in public?”

She smiles over her shoulder, even as she dives for her suitcase. “I _thought_ you needed it – honey, I brought your hat!”


End file.
